First, I wanted to say a huge Thank you to everyone who responded with their thoughts and ideas. I think I've finally gotten the recipe figured out and wanted to share. I made a batch of the Healthy Hermits the other day. While not exactly the same the texture is very close to the store bought ones. Here is the updated recipe with some more details at the end.
Healthy Hermits:
1 1/2 cup raisin paste (I soak raisins in hot water and then puree them)
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar (or sucanat)
1/2 cup honey
1 tsp vanilla
1 eggs
1 cups all purpose flour
1 cup whole grain flour *
1 cup oats
1/4 cup almonds or walnuts chopped fine
2 TB sunflower seeds
2 TB poppy seeds
1/4 cup flax seed
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cloves OR nutmeg
Mix all wet ingredients. In separate bowl mix together all dry ingredients. Add dry ingredients to wet mixture. Stir to combine. Pour into greased 15 X 10 inch pan. Bake at 350 until done 15-17 minutes. (start checking at 15 minutes!!) Cool, cut into bars. Approx. 3 dozen (depending on how big you cut them).
When these baked up there was some air trapped under under the batter so mine had some "mountains" but I just poked them with a knife to release the steam and it worked fine (they fell correctly and once cooled you couldn't tell). I also ran out of ground cloves so I substituted nutmeg. The flavor was still really great.
...and now for another treat :)
Right before Valentine's day I was trying to decide what to make for the kids to bring in for their classmates. My sister in law posted on Facebook a link to a recipe for Red Velvet whoopie pies. I thought they would work great for a Valentine's treat. After looking over the recipe (found here) I decided that I wanted to change things up a bit.
I generally don't like making whoopie pies because the idea of using that much shortening just bothers me and I just find it gross :) I really liked this recipe because it used butter rather than shortening and only used 1/2 cup in the cakes and 1/2 cup in the filling (much better than the full cup of shortening, just in the filling, that I'd seen in other recipes).
My only real issue with the McCormick recipe was that the recipe called for a whole bottle of red food coloring. I don't like using artificial ingredients when I cook and so the idea of dumping a whole bottle (yes, I realize it's only 1 oz) into perfectly good cake batter bothered me. I was sure I could find a better alternative.
While thinking over my options (and doing some searching on Google) I remembered that I had a bag of frozen raspberries. YAY! I ended up making two minor changes to this recipe that really worked well.
First, I thawed the raspberries and drained them (saving the juice). Then I used 2 TB (1 oz) of the juice in place of the red food coloring (please note: this did not color the batter red but I needed to replace the fluid in the recipe and the raspberry juice worked for that). For the filling I left out the vanilla and added 2 TB (I started with 1 but really needed the second one) of the raspberries to the filling. I whisked it all together in the mixer and filled them as normal. While the cakes were not red, the filling was a great shade of pink and still fit the bill for a Valentine treat.
These really were the best whoopie pies I'd ever had. The raspberry flavor is strong enough and really goes well with the chocolate. I'll definitely be making these again and will probably try some other variations in the future.
Why share all these recipe adventures? I want to encourage you to not be afraid to change things up. I rarely follow a recipe exactly. Once you begin changing recipes and substituting ingredients you'll learn what does and doesn't work. This knowledge has saved me a lot of last minute trips out for one or two ingredients, has been very useful now that I have two children with food allergies to very common foods (apples and tomatoes), and it's fun! Just one note of "caution" make sure to note (either mentally or on paper) what changes you make so that you can recreate the dishes that you really love. Happy Baking!
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