Am I seasonally appropriate or what?

The wild Jim spots its prey.


He moves in for the kill.

Don't know what it is, but this new fall weather (seriously, folks, it's been in the 70s this past week! It even hit 65 once!) has me in the mood to bake. Last week my sister Emmy and I made banana cream pie and bright blue merengues, over the weekend I made apple turnovers, and yesterday I baked up a big batch of these Pumpkin Spice Whoopie Pies. Good thing Noah already had his weigh-in for this quarter.

These whoopie pies are probably Jim's favorite out of everything I've made recently. I got the recipe here, but I had to edit it a little. I used a little more vanilla and regular sugar instead of Splenda (I've got this unreasonable paranoia about artificial sweeteners), and cut the sugar in the frosting by about a quarter. It was still a little too sweet, so if anybody out there decides to make it, I'd cut the sugar in the frosting fully in half. Or use more cream cheese, maybe. More cream cheese is always better.

Pumpkin Spice Whoopie Pies with Cream Cheese Filling
Makes 12 plus some cupcakes

3 cups flour
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ginger
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cloves
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1 15 oz. can of pumpkin
2 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Beat together brown sugar, sugar , oil and pumpkin. Add eggs one at time, followed by the vanilla. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet stuff until just combined. Using a big plastic bag (I used 1 gallon size, and it worked pretty well) with one corner snipped off, squeeze out circles of batter onto a cookie sheet, starting from the middle and working outward to make 2" circles (12 per cookie sheet). Bake for 11 minutes and cool on a rack.

Note - there will probably be some batter left over. Either make extra whoopie pies or do what I did and use the rest for pumpkin cupcakes. They take about 25 minutes in the oven.

Cream Cheese Filling
1 8 oz. package of cream cheese, softened
1 stick of unsalted butter, softened
8 oz powdered sugar, or more or less to taste (original recipe called for 16oz, but it was way too sweet)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

When the cookie part is completely cool, assemble by spreading frosting on the flat side of one cookie then smooshing it together with another one to make a tasty sandwich. Easiest way I found was to just put a big glob of frosting in the middle with a knife and let the smooshing press it out to the sides.