Buying Whoopee

Walk into a general store in any Maine town (coast, mountains, the County), and chances are high that there will be some sort of glass case at the cash register, with an assortment of baked goods in it. And if there is such a case, chances are superb that one of the items in that case will be a whoopee pie.

And how far is that reach? Well, it extends at least to Massachusetts, where Peg grew up. They don't appear in my grocery store in Minnesota, but I had heard of them, and may even have been able to give a description of them. The King Arthur flour company sells a pan for making them, and even publishes a recipe in its catalogue, to satisfy the craving of New England expats.

For people living beyond the reach of The Pie, a brief description is in order. The color scheme of a whoopee pie -- chocolate brown and fluffy white -- makes you briefly think "oreo." But only briefly, for the dimensions of the whoopee pie make you think "Texas." A proper whoopee pie, which is about the diameter of a CD and, at its thickest point, about as tall as your average closed laptop computer, consists of two chocolate cakes sandwiched together with breathtaking quantities of fluffy white frosting. It looks like a flying saucer; the cakes are baked in special pans that make them flat on one side and beautifully domed on the other. (Think "muffin top.")

The cakes, depending upon the general store, range from gummy, metallic tasting, just-add-water cake mix cakes, through your premium add-oil-and-egg mixes, all the way (on rare, rare occasions) to real, live, genuine delicious homemade chocolate cake. Sometimes they're deep dark brown; other times they look more like milk chocolate cake. (Truth be told, they never knock your socks off with their full, rich chocolatey flavor; this is not the kind of cake you would set out to make for a chocolate lover's birthday.) The cake is dense and firm enough to hold three quarters of an inch of frosting.

The frosting, in the best circumstances, makes me think of the filling of the Twinkie (a childhood favorite for which I must admit I still nurse a secret passion). It's perfectly smooth, light and fluffy. But not ephemerally, whipped-creamy, beaten egg-whitey fluffy; I'd call it industrially fluffy. You get the sense that the frosting (filling?) in this whoopee pie might be able to hold up for the next few years. At least a few weeks. It's sweet--kid sweet.

That's the best frosting. The not-so-good kind is obviously crisco and powdered sugar; it's just a bit gritty, and it doesn't fluff up right. (I think Peg secretly prefers this kind; she has a thing for powdered sugar frosting.)

Whatever its quality, the frosting must be mounded on thick. So thick that the resultant pie is far taller than your mouth can accommodate. So thick it always gooshes out the sides when you bite down, and you have to swipe the excess with your index finger and eat it, plain.

This summer, our, our favorite pie was the one at the Eggemoggin Store, on Route 15 on the Blue Hill peninsula, just before you turn right to go to Deer Isle.

Peg notes that the best ones are always wrapped in in regular old kitchen saran wrap--a detail that indicates "homemade." (This, in contrast to the pies that have obviously been sealed in cellophane by a machine.) She also argues that a whoopee pie is more than the sum of its parts--that the beauty of this food lies in the relationship BETWEEN the cake and the frosting. (Readers will be unsurprised to learn that Devil Dogs, not Twinkies, are her snack food of choice.)