I first tried these on our recent trip to New Zealand. I’m usually a good sharer and will offer my dining companion a taste or half of what I’m eating. Not so in this case. I was greedy and unrepentant. I had never tried a biscuit or cookie like this before. It was a thick cookie with an intriguing texture, dry but not desert-dry, with a slightly crispy crunchy touch to it-the closest that I could describe it was similar to cookie crossed with a cupcake-the cupcake part due to the icing. Plus a walnut half on the top.

When I returned, I kept thinking about how much I’d like to make these again so I asked Tammy from Wee Treats By Tammy who is a NZ food blogger if she knew a good recipe for them. She knew straight away what I wanted and sent me the recipe from the fantastic “Ladies, a plate” cookbook by Alexa Johnston. The cookbook’s title is a reference to the community events where women were asked to bake goodies and the invitations would begin with a “Ladies, a plate”. The recipe was from a Mrs Marian Benton’s recipe book which was lent to the author by Benton’s daughter. The gorgeous and easy to work with glossy chocolate icing was developed by Lois Daish.

Looking through the recipe I thought that it was simple and straightforward. Simple enough to get M’s sons S and In to give it a try. Like many mums she wants her kids to have cooking skills and encouraging them to start making their own items is a good start so we arranged to do this at Adrienne and Nick’s house where we managed to drag the boys away from their Wii obsession into making some cookies. The reward? As many cookies you can stuff into your waiting mouth. And with that, the deal was instantly struck and the Wii temporarily forgotten for S.

The best part of baking

As for the etymology of the name, there are plenty of theories and none with a consensus as to being the correct one. Some say that they resemble the craggy mountains of Afghanistan, some say that they were made by Afghan settlers in Australia although they’re definitely more of a NZ thing than they are here. One theory also purports that the cookies resemble the Afghani people with the cookie their skin, the icing the hair and the walnut their turban.

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Readers of NQN are fabulous people as they suggest things that they think I’d like to make. One of these readers is Sydneygal who sent me this article from the NY Times about the resurgence of the Whoopie Pie. Said to be the next big thing after cupcakes, they’re a more homely, less fancy version of a cupcake. I knew I had to make it, more out of curiosity as I only had a fleeting familiarity with just the concept having never eaten one before. Said to be named so as they were originally made by Amish  housewives to be given to  farmer husbands, they were said to exclaim “Whoopie!” upon discovering the treat in their lunchboxes.

I was watching The View…yes there I’ve said it. I watch The View. I never used to understand why people would want to watch a bunch of ladies bickering and yelling over each other simultaneously on screen and I certainly never watched the Australian version called The Catch up (the name was enough to dissuade me from watching) but slowly I became accustomed to watching The View and now watch it every day. My need to reach into the screen to throttle Elisabeth has even lessened although this is probably due to the US election being over.

But I digress, they were also talking about the Whoopie Pie story. Suddenly the Whoopie Pie jumped to the top of the list and I found myself looking up the recipe to see whether I could do it. Having just made a cake, I was dangerously low on sugar in my pantry. And despite many suggestions from tweeps to knock on my neighbour’s doors I schlepped it down to the shops to get my precious sugar. Which as it turns out, I didn’t end up using due to the late hour.

I used Zingerman Bakehouse’s recipe for the cake itself and decided to use the filling in the Taste.com.au recipe as it was easier than doing a Swiss Buttercream which I can’t do as I don’t have a handheld electric mixer-that broke and was replaced by the Kitchenaid. The filling is easy, just melt some marshmallows with a little water and sandwich together.

The cookies or cake or whatever you’d like to call them are soft but taste a bit like a supermarket chocolate cake-whilst looking like a cookie and while they are cooling they are delicate. By themselves, they aren’t too bad although they do need a cream to wodge them together and give them some added oomph. I do think that a buttercream might be a better match for a filling than the marshmallows which while easy, end up being a bit bland. I added some tiny chocolate flakes to upp the chocolate count although the original recipe didn’t specify these. In my humble opinion, I think they taste all the better for it.

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This is my second recipe from my friend Kathy’s in law’s recipe book, the Raimo cookbook. For those of you that didn’t read the story on the cookbook, it’s a wonderful collection of Post War recipes, still relevant today, that a Mother collected and gave to her new daughter in law in order for her to keep her son well fed. To me, there were certain recipes that jumped out to me immediately and this was one of them being a French Toast fanatic. I had never heard of combining French Toast with cream cheese but the idea somehow seemed so logical.

The recipe below gives measures but it depends of course on the size and type of bread you are using. I had a round 23cms/9inch diameter roll so the 2 eggs covered 1.5 sandwiches which gave 1.5 servings but of course if you use a smaller loaf you may be able to get 3 or 4 sandwiches out of it. I served it to hubby for a lazy weekend brunch and he loved it. Adored it. In fact he asked for it for dinner too.

As for me, there was one clear partner to this- Smoked Salmon. It’s a natural partner for cream cheese. I’ve given Margaret Raimo’s original recipe as well as written it out, with a couple of hints. Just make sure that you have enough ingredients for the inevitable dinner requests later that day.

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