For a treat after making that pumpkin lasagna, I used some of my remaining pumpkin puree to bake whoopie pies, naturally! Actually, this was my first encounter with whoopie pies, which seem to be popping up all over the blogosphere like moist, cream-filled sweet mushroom caps. The traditional version is a cakey chocolate cookie with vanilla filling, but this recipe for spiced pumpkin and maple-scented cream cheese frosting has been making the rounds in the weeks leading up to Halloween, and I could only resist for so long.

The cookies themselves are very easy to bake up and remind me of a slightly wetter version of my mother’s pumpkin cookie recipe. I used a 2-tablespoon disher to portion out the dough, and after cutting the recipe in half, ended up with 30 cookies for an end result of 15 3″ whoopie pies, more than enough for us to eat over the course of a few days. The filling is equally easy; the hardest part was making my own powdered sugar, since I didn’t have any on hand. My smallest disher, which holds about 2 teaspoons, turned out to hold just the right amount of filling for that squish factor without making a mess when you take a bite.

One caveat about these whoopie pies: The pumpkin makes them super-moist, so you may want to line your storage container with waxed paper. Ours glued themselves down and wanted to come apart a little when we tried to pick them up. A small price to pay, I’d say, and not the last time whoopie pies will be on our menu!