I've been thinking a lot about oatmeal cream pies lately. Maybe it’s a pregnancy craving, but I’ve hesitated to buy the Little Debbie variety after an abysmal experience with zebra cakes a few years ago (in short, zebra cakes are not good).
So instead, here’s my take on an oatmeal cream pie. I upped the molasses because it adds a bittersweetness that compliments the very sweet filling nicely. Lessened the oat. Added a hair of orange to the filling because doesn’t that sound festive?! These cookies are fairly simple—cue the eye rolls once you get to making the marshmallow fluff filling that requires a thermometer…I promise! It’s very straightforward!—and yet they would impress dinner party guests or your grandma who has been the family baker for generations or whoever you want to share them with.
Lemme know if you make them! Day 2 in the books. Until tomorrow—love you <3
MOLASSES CREAM PIES
Makes 22 cookie pies
Cookies:
4 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup old-fashioned oats, ground to couscous-sized bits*
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon cloves
⅛ teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon baking soda
2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 ½ cups dark brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
½ cup molasses
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon vinegar
Granulated sugar, for coating
Filling:
⅔ cup granulated sugar
½ cup corn syrup
2 egg whites
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon orange zest
*This ingredient is meant to add texture and a little body, sort of like an oatmeal cream pie. But if you don't have oats or don't want to get your blender out, you could just increase the flour by 1/3 cup.
Make cookie dough:
In a medium-sized bowl, combine the flour, ground oats, ginger, salt, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, and baking soda. Set aside.
In the bowl of a stand mixer or large mixing bowl, combine the butter, brown sugar & granulated sugar together. Mix on medium-high speed for about five or so minutes. People often describe this as getting “fluffy,” but that has never felt accurate to me. I think the color better represents what you’re looking for. It’ll go from a deep, chocolatey brown to a lighter, more golden brown. Scrape down the sides of the bowl once or twice as you wait for this to happen.
With the mixer on low, add the eggs one at a time, letting each incorporate fully. You’ll need to scrape here too.
Still on low, add the molasses, vanilla and vinegar on low until it barely comes together. Now, add half of your dry ingredients and mix until there are just a few visible dry flour bits. Scrape the bowl well now before adding the last of your dry ingredients. Mix until the flour is just barely incorporated or maybe not even entirely because you can use a spatula to do one last mix of all of the ingredients.
If you plan on scooping cookies, cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and chill as is. If you plan on cutting and measuring cookies on a scale, you can lay plastic wrap down on the counter and dump the dough out. Press it into a rectangular shape about 1 ½ inches thick and wrap it well. Chill the dough, either way, for roughly 2 hours, up to overnight.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper & put about ½ cup granulated sugar into a small bowl.
If you’re scooping, use a 1 oz scoop to create balls of dough and line them up on one of your prepared sheet pans. If you’re measuring, use a bench scraper to cut cubes of dough 30g-33g in size and, same thing, line them up on one of the sheet pans.
Once all of the dough is portioned, go back and roll the dough pieces into balls and toss them in the granulated sugar. You can start to line them up now on your other sheet pan, leaving about 2 inches in between the cookies so that they have room to grow. On my quarter sheet pan, I could fit 12.
Bake the cookies for 8-12 minutes, until they start to crack a little and in those cracks, there’s a glimmer of moisture, but they aren’t wet. Does that make sense? Oh well.
If you’re baking two trays at a time, rotate and switch racks after 5 minutes. I only baked one tray at a time and kept the tray of extra dough balls in the fridge until I was ready to bake another batch. Cool the cookies completely on wire racks if you have them. If not, let them cool on the pans for 10 minutes before transferring them to a plate or tupperware or whatever holding place you’ll keep them while you make the filling.
Make the filling:
In a small sauce pot, add about ¼ cup water (measure it or not, doesn’t matter. This is just to keep the sugar from burning/crystallizing. Did that scare you?! Don’t leave, it’s not scary!) Add the sugar and corn syrup to the pot and turn on a medium-high heat. Don’t stir or anything, just let it do its thing.
Add your egg whites and cream of tartar to the bowl of a stand mixer (highly recommended here), or a large mixing bowl. Once the sugar comes to a rolling boil (if you want to be super precise, look for roughly 225 degrees), start whisking the egg whites on a medium speed. If you must, you can do this by hand, but my pregnant body can’t imagine whisking for as long as you’re about to. I do suggest at least a handheld mixer.
You want to cook the sugar syrup to roughly 240 degrees (a few degrees above or below won’t kill you!) and you want to add the syrup to the egg whites when they’re at a soft peak, meaning they have gotten white and foamy, but if you lift the whisk, they still fall back down into themselves. If the egg whites come to this point too soon, you can slow the mixing to low while you wait for the sugar. If the sugar syrup is done too quickly, pull it from the heat and crank the whites to get them there ASAP.
Once your whites are at soft peaks and the sugar is at 240, slowly stream the sugar into whites with the mixer on medium-high. The stream should go down the side of the bowl—away from the whisk—as if If you’re creating a creek from the sauce pot down into the whites. If you're working with a handheld, add about a tablespoon of syrup at a time, mix for a minute or two, and repeat until about half the syrup is added, then you can add about 1/4 cup at a time.
When all the syrup is added, let the mixture whip and whip and whip until it's super glossy and voluminous—like marshmallow fluff, which is what you just made! Woohoo! This took my mixture just about 6 minutes, but might take longer, especially with a handheld.
Add the vanilla and orange zest and mix on medium-low just to combine. This can be stored at room temperature for a week or so if you’re not ready to fill the cookies right now. You might just need to whisk it back to life a bit.
If you’re ready to finish these cookies, let’s do this. I like to pair up the cookies ahead of time. Yes, we measured them so they should all be similarly sized, but somehow there are always some outliers.
For filling, I prefer using a piping bag, but you could absolutely just use an offset spatula or butter knife to dollop fluff directly onto the cookies. Pipe or spread a couple tablespoons of filling onto the bottom of one cookie and top with another. Keep going until all are filled.
Now eat them! Or give them to friends! Or put them in an airtight container and save them for roughly three days! Or wrap them well and freeze them until you’re ready to eat them!
I had a little leftover fluff, and you might too. You can use it on sundaes or make fluffernutters or eat it with a spoon. Love you <3
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