I give you the whoopie pie experiment.
I give you the whoopie pie experiment. Which was both a success and not a success. The gingerbread cake part came out really well. It was an attempt to see if I could mess with the Trader Joe's gingerbread mix.
I cut the water to 1/2 cup and the oil to 1/4 cup and added 1/8 tsp baking powder. I made nice little 3" round mounds of batter and got seven 4-4 1/2" nice little round cake mounds. So they are really too big for one person servings. I'd make much smaller rounds if I did this again, since they both puff up and spread out.
I attempted to make a filling without solid fat, because experimenting. In addition, traditional fillings are basically an exercise in making saturated, solid at room temperature fats palatable, meaning a lot of sugar. And fat. So I made a thick, low sugar lemon curd without butter, and a stiff Italian meringue (just the meringue), and combined them. It tastes super lemony and is very light. Unfortunately, there appears to be a difficult to avoid structural reason for those fatty fat fat fats.
I mean, I could get weird and play with guar gum, or gelatin, or agar, or something, but that mostly just gets icky if you get it that firm. It'd be like eating tapioca pearls that hadn't quite dissolved, which, yuck.
I did consider converting to a German buttercream, aka crème mousseline. Mostly people do this by using a custard and adding butter to it, but Serious Eats (I know, I know) has a version where you whip up the butter first, and then add the custard to that. It would have worked fine, but then I would have caved to the fat.
So the filling didn't have the tensile strength to hold up the cakes as a sandwich, but it works as a creamy topping in a dish. You could also freeze it, but meh. It's very tasty as is. You just can't hold it in your hand and eat it. Well, not if you don't want to be wearing the filling and having to lick it off everything it got all over.
https://goo.gl/photos/4KViUzdxoPktqMDW9
I cut the water to 1/2 cup and the oil to 1/4 cup and added 1/8 tsp baking powder. I made nice little 3" round mounds of batter and got seven 4-4 1/2" nice little round cake mounds. So they are really too big for one person servings. I'd make much smaller rounds if I did this again, since they both puff up and spread out.
I attempted to make a filling without solid fat, because experimenting. In addition, traditional fillings are basically an exercise in making saturated, solid at room temperature fats palatable, meaning a lot of sugar. And fat. So I made a thick, low sugar lemon curd without butter, and a stiff Italian meringue (just the meringue), and combined them. It tastes super lemony and is very light. Unfortunately, there appears to be a difficult to avoid structural reason for those fatty fat fat fats.
I mean, I could get weird and play with guar gum, or gelatin, or agar, or something, but that mostly just gets icky if you get it that firm. It'd be like eating tapioca pearls that hadn't quite dissolved, which, yuck.
I did consider converting to a German buttercream, aka crème mousseline. Mostly people do this by using a custard and adding butter to it, but Serious Eats (I know, I know) has a version where you whip up the butter first, and then add the custard to that. It would have worked fine, but then I would have caved to the fat.
So the filling didn't have the tensile strength to hold up the cakes as a sandwich, but it works as a creamy topping in a dish. You could also freeze it, but meh. It's very tasty as is. You just can't hold it in your hand and eat it. Well, not if you don't want to be wearing the filling and having to lick it off everything it got all over.
https://goo.gl/photos/4KViUzdxoPktqMDW9
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