Devil Dogs

The recipe for D day was Deviled Eggs.  It's pretty boring to watch eggs boil, plus it would take almost half of our class time.  So I was on a mission to find another D recipe.  Did you know that Whoopie Pies are also called Devil Dogs?  How cool is that, since I just made Whoopie Pies the week before with the older group!  I thought I would simplify it for the Sprouts class and have the spinach done ahead of time.  Silly me to think I could just buy a jar of spinach baby food.  I guess it has been over 11 years since I have bought baby food...I guess they don't sell spinach any more.  From the contamination problems, maybe?  Anyway, I pureed the baby spinach before class, but didn't quite have time to get it as smooth as I would have liked, since I needed to also SHOVEL!!!  Finally got some snow, but couldn't it have waited until after class!?  It was a nasty day, but everyone ventured out in it to come to cooking class.

There were definitely some turned up noses and "yucks" when they saw the spinach.  But lo and behold, all plates were clean in the end.

Sweets for My Sweet

We made a BIG mess, but it was definitely worth it.  Our Peppermint Brownie Pops were delicious!  (though they ended up being Bites and not pops).  We really painted our muffin tins with LOTS of coconut oil,  but they were still very tough to get out.  As much as I don't like to use a spray oil, the best thing to use for these is Baker's Joy.  It has flour in it, and when I sold Pampered Chef, it's what they recommended for making brownies in this pan.

We were so busy decorating and packaging, I didn't take any pictures of the finished product.  But they were very cute....each decorated with red, white and pink heart sprinkles and chopped up peppermint candies, and packaged in a clear favor bag wrapped with a ribbon, and popped into a red bag we decorated with Valentine's Day stickers.

Whoopie Pies February 3, 2012

I loved how independent these girls were tonight.  Katie ran the food processor and McKenna ran the mixer.  I barely had to do anything!  And Veda was such a great helper to Carys.

I had a bit of a panic attack in the middle of our recipe.  I had forgotten a key ingredient in the filling.  Luckily my neighbor Theresa was able to help me out-- I can always count on her.  Good neighbors are priceless.

Our recipe came from one of Jessica Seinfeld's books.  I'm not all about hiding ingredients from children; I tried it when the boys were young and got caught a number of times.  "What is this orange stuff under the cheese?  It doesn't look like sauce...yuck!  Pureed carrots???"  I do put some shredded carrots and zucchini into my spaghetti sauce, but that's not really sneaky, just adding a healthy ingredient.  But I was so intrigued by this Whoopie Pie recipe that uses spinach puree,  I wanted to give it a try.  And I'm soooooo glad I did.  We used baby spinach, wilted it a bit in a pan and pureed it in the food processor (and the trusty Magic Bullet...the amount of spinach was a bit too small to finish the job in the processor).  

I did swap out a couple of ingredients;  instead of brown sugar, we used organic dehydrated cane juice, and coconut oil in place of the called-for "light olive oil".  The filling will be better next time...when I actually remember to buy the marshmallow cream and don't have to melt marshmallows.  What a sticky mess!  We just added a bit more butter and vanilla to make it easier to mix.  We did use dark, dutch process cocoa, because I like dark chocolate.  Using regular cocoa would probably give a little different flavor.  

I think I originally found the recipe on Pinterest, and it's from THIS blog.