Like most Mums I think that the hardest thing that I have to deal with is seeing my son in pain. Ben is 16 now and suffers from Chronic Pain syndrome. He took the very brave decision to drop back an academic school year and repeat Year 10 due to the amount of time he missed from school last year.
I am so proud of my son because not only is he keeping up with his studies and doing his GCSE examination but he is managing to do this on a few hours sleep every night, very potent medication and varying levels of pain, from bearable to not being able to walk and screaming all night long! Most people don’t realise quite what Ben has to go through on a day-to-day basis.
We don’t have much spare money, I gave up a full-time teaching job to look after him and now make wedding and celebration cakes from home. Consequently if Ben wants a treat, a meal out or a new game for his X-box, he has to wait until I have sold a cake or two.
My way of treating Ben is to let him choose what baking he wants me to do. Usually it is chocolate chip cookies but this week he asked for whoopie pies. I can’t take credit for this recipe as I found it in the Hummingbird Bakery’s “Cake Days” recipe book. I did, however, switch their natural yoghurt and milk for buttermilk as I had some that needed using up.
Ingredients
- 1 egg
- 150g caster sugar
- 150ml buttermilk
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 75g melted margarine
- 275g plain flour
- 0.75 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 0.25 tsp baking powder
- 150g chocolate chips (I used a mixture of milk and dark)
Icing
- 170g butter
- 2Tbs cocoa
- 280g icing sugar
- 220g vanilla marshmallow fluff
Method
- Preheat the oven to 170C / 150C fan
- Line a baking tray with parchment paper
- Beat the egg and sugar together until pale and fluffy
- Slowly add the buttermilk, margarine and vanilla to the eggs
- Add the dry ingredients
- Stir in the chocolate chips
- Heap large spoonfuls of the mixture onto the baking tray, allowing plenty of room for the mixture to spread. (I used and ice cream scoop but I think it was too big as the pies were HUGE!)
- Bake for 10-13 min then cool on a rack.
- Beat the icing ingredients together then pop in the fridge to firm up a little.
- Use the icing to sandwich the pies together. I made 6 pies but I think 10 is a better number as mine really were massive!
thecakedoctorssurgery 