Carrot cake whoopie pies!

Yesterday at Sur La Table I picked up a whoopie pie recipe book, Whoopie Pies by Sarah Billingsley, Amy Treadwell, and Antonis Archilleos.  I really like the layout of it because the first 40 pages or so are full of facts and history of whoopie pies, along with illustrations about how to store, package, and assemble the pies.  

Also, the recipes are separated - cake recipes first, and then filling, so you can mix and match them as you wish.  I realize I could do this even if they weren't separated, but the layout promotes, or pretty much forces you to be creative and play around with the different flavors to find your favorite combination.  There's even a pistachio-cardamom whoopie recipe - definitely trying that one!  

This morning I was going through the book to find a recipe that I could make today with ingredients we have on hand.  We went the grocery store yesterday but I was just thinking about the basics for the week, and not any baking projects, so I didn't pick up anything special that some of these recipes needed.  That meant all of the chocolate-based ones were out since we don't have powdered cocoa, and most of the others needed buttermilk, which we never have.  Then I turned to the carrot cake one - and I know it sounds weird (if you know us) that we actually had some carrots in the fridge, so this recipe was the one for today!

Unfortunately the carrots in the fridge were baby carrots for dipping, so I it took a good while to grate enough to fill 2 cups...I might have grated my middle finger at one point, just a graze. 

I mixed up the carrot cake mixture and chilled it for an hour.  Then I used a 2 tbsp. scooper to drop dough on a parchment-lined cookie sheet.  I baked them for 20 minutes and let them cool for a few minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack.  Then I baked the second set of pies - the recipe said to bake 1 cookie sheet at a time. 

Once they were all cooked and cooled, I matched up 2 pieces of cake so both cake pieces of each whoopie pie would be the same size.  Then I got started on the frosting.

I decided to go traditional and use the classic cream cheese frosting.  I'm not quite ready for chocolate or peanut butter frosting with carrot cake, although I'm sure all those flavors would do well together.  Once the frosting was mixed, I used the same method for frosting cupcakes for piping the filling onto the bottom piece of the whoopie.  

Then I put the top on, and voila, you have a whoopie pie!