Whoopie Pies with German Buttercream

Makes 24 pieces

I love the suggestion below of not using shortening for the filling.

Might I suggest that you could use room temperature cream cheese mixed into vanilla instant pudding (I warm the cream cheese on low for a minute or so to make it even softer and whip a half cup of warm until smooth and then add it while I am mixing the pudding with the remainder of the cold milk, so do not add more milk, just use a little of the milk to be used for the pudding.) Or, make home made custard and mix in already warmed cream cheese when you take the custard off the stove and put the custard to cool to thicken the cream for the center of the Whoopie Pies.

The Author's comments below give a great variation of the home made custard.


The Author advises:

Two personal taste obstacles though. I am not a fan of shortening and avoid it whenever I can substitute real butter. For the filling German butter cream seemed a good option but one of the reasons why I am not a fan of it neither is that it is often so hard and stiff that it crumbles.
Replacing the shortening in the original recipe was easy and the dough came out great. I also used less sugar than the original recipe called for (1 cup instead of 1½ cups). Tweaking the butter cream was a bit trickier. I do not make butter cream often and wasn't sure how much I needed to make the buttercream just solid enough to spread and not run off. One stick of butter worked just fine to make the filling velvety smooth.
German butter cream is made with custard and butter, and they must both have the same temperature, or else the butter will curdle.
If I make those again, I might add other flavors to the buttercream, such as coffee. (If you use the butter cream, can add a tablespoon of peanut butter.)

Whoopie Pies with German Butter cream
Adapted from Bertha Sweet’s Whoopie Pie recipe, courtesy of Judy von Feldt.