Whoopie Pies

At some point in the last year, America's love affair with cupcakes started to cool off. We as a nation weren't thinking about cupcakes all the time. We didn't return the cupcake's calls as quickly as we used to. We just weren't that into cupcakes anymore.

It might have had something to do with cupcakes putting on airs. We could still recall a time when cupcakes were what your mom made for a kid's birthday party -- and not even her favorite kid. They were what you made when you couldn't be bothered to make a proper cake. How on earth could someone charge five dollars for one?

So we moved on. Sure, we still saw cupcakes sometimes, shared some jokes, maybe even a few nibbles. But when we went home and wiped that cream off our lips, we didn't feel that old frisson anymore.

Now we were making whoopie.
The humble whoopie pie has begun to replace cupcake in our affection, at least here on the East Coast. The whoopie pie, for the uninitiated, consists of two round pieces of cake (chocolate or pumpkin, generally) and a sandwich filling of sweet, creamy frosting. (I grew up in Northern California, where we didn't know whoopie pies from a whoopie cushion. The closest thing to them in San Francisco was It's-It – a slab of vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two oatmeal cookies and dipped in chocolate. We'd get them at Playland-by-the-Sea, if we were good. And I just saw them for sale at my local gourmet market, too!)

According to one legend, whoopie pies were invented by Amish women around Lancaster, Pennsylvania. According to legend, they got so excited when they baked them that they cried, "Whoopie!" Hard to imagine, but fun is relative when you're Amish. (Whoopie pies can still be bought at roadside stands in Amish country, if you're lucky.)

At some point the pies migrated to Maine, which must have been fun to watch. One sign of the whoopie pies' ascendence from lowly roadside snack to epicurean delight du jour came last year, when the late, lamented "Gourmet" magazine ran this recipe, after perfecting it in its test kitchen. (Being Gourmet, they couldn't just make an old-fashioned chocolate whoopie pie, heavens no! They made zucchini whoopie pies.)

Then there was this blog by New York's Restaurant Girl, who name-checked her favorite purveyors of WP in the five boroughs. Cupcakes, -- especially red velvet cupcakes -- got a leg-up from their recurring role in "Sex & the City," and the sexy looking Restaurant Girl couldn't help but make whoopie pies the next treat Carrie Bradshaw should eat. Using the Restaurant Girl's list, I visited three purveyors of whoopie pies in my adopted borough of Brooklyn.

One Girl Cookies (68 Dean Street; 212-675-4996) was the oldest of the three bakeries, at a mere four years of age. I'd actually had their whoopie pies before, without knowing what they were called. (I just thought they were big cookies, in this case about a 2½-inch circumference.) The girl with glasses behind the counter said they'd been selling them ($1.50 each) since they opened (though she looked like she would have been twelve then), and that she had heard that pumpkin was the original flavor and Maine was the whoopie pie's true ancestral home.

My next stop was the Trois Pommes Patisserie (260 5th Avenue; 718-230-3119), where another bespectacled lass marveled with me at the rise of the humble pie. They started making them last year, "about the time the buzz began." They sold chocolate, pumpkin and red velvet pies, and they were small, too – maybe two inches around – but taller and more pillowy than One Girl's. They also cost more ($2.50/ea.), but the Trois Pommes is a place that sells Stumptown coffee for $12 a half-pound, so go figure.

My last port-of-pie was the Joyce Bakeshop (646 Vanderbilt Avenue; 718-623-7470), which has been selling whoopie pies "from the beginning" – meaning when they opened, three years ago. Their version is bigger (about 4") and flatter than the Trois Pommes; it's also more expensive ($3.25), even if you could split it with another person (though I suspect you would just need to buy another one or sit there silently resenting each other). Chocolate is the only flavor on the menu, and the young counterwoman with the scarf and the nose ring explained that she, like me, was, like, from California and had never heard of whoopie pies until she worked there. "But then I stopped in this little mom-and-pop place in Maine and they had them too!"

I brought some samples home, all the while proud of myself for not inhaling them in the car, and shared them with my 16-year-old daughter, Franny. It wouldn't be fair to call it a taste-test, since it wasn't blind and we ate them rather quickly, like bears foraging for berries. I think we agreed that the One Girl ones were the best, with the best cookie-to-cream ratio and consistency – Trois Pommes' version seemed to have too much cake, and the Joyce version, while not too sweet, kind of fell apart while we were eating it. There were no complaints, though, and as the young woman at the Joyce remarked, as we spoke of the whoopie pie's origins, "Further research would be needed!"