Baking for Netball

So, any of you who have read my little blurb about me, or, in fact, know me, will know that I'm a keen netball umpire. I love netball, even though it's not very well known worldwide, I think it's a fantastic sport. So I go every Saturday to the sports centre in Kilbirnie (near where I live) and umpire different games in our regional club competition. This year, two women who are also umpires have been buying food and bringing it for all of us to eat and just hoping that people will be kind enough to donate. Last week there was some baking there also, so I thought that this week it could be my turn! My boyfriend (Cam) and I have baked these twice, and the first time they turned out great, the second time they were more like pancakes than pies... But this time they turned out really well again. You'll notice that there are vanilla ones in the picture, but I didn't really like the recipe for those ones, they were also a little flat and didn't really taste as good. So I'm just going to put up the chocolate recipe and if you really, REALLY want to make the vanilla ones, then just omit the cocoa powder and use 1 1/2 cups of plain flour instead. I found this recipe in an Australian Women's Weekly cookbook.

Chocolate Whoopie Pies (my mum said that they used to be called Sponge Drops as well.)

Ingredients:
125g butter, softened
2t vanilla extract
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
3/4 cup plain flour
1/4 cup self-raising flour*
1t baking soda
3/4 cup cocoa powder
2/3 cup buttermilk

60g butter, softened
3/4 cup icing sugar
1T milk

Directions:
Preheat oven to 200°C. Grease and line oven trays with baking paper. Beat butter, extract, sugar and egg in a bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in sifted dry ingredients and buttermilk, in two batches, on low speed, until mixture is smooth. Drop level teaspoons of mixture onto trays, 4cm apart. Bake about 8 minutes. Cool on trays. Meanwhile, make butter cream filling. Join cooled pies with butter cream filling.

Butter Cream Filling:
Beat butter in a small bowl with electric mixer until as white as possible. Gradually beat in half the sifted icing sugar and the milk, beat in remaining sifted icing sugar.

*Self-raising flour: If you don't have any, don't go out and buy some. Self-raising flour is just plain flour with baking powder. So, for every cup of plain flour, add 1t baking powder. For this recipe, that means ^1/4t baking powder.

These are amazing, do not bake alone or you will eat them all! But enjoy. :)