Boxed Cake Mix Is Your Shortcut To Bakery-Quality Whoopie Pies, Here's How

Whoopie pies are one of those treats that seem simple to make but are surprisingly a bit more complicated to pull off in a home kitchen. The trick is getting the texture of the cake to be both strong enough to work like a sandwich, yet light enough to retain a fluffy texture. Many homemade whoopie pies come out too soft and fragile to hold together or too dense and dry to feel like they were made in a bakery. The good news, however, is you can easily achieve whoopie pie perfection using a boxed cake mix — all you have to do is reduce the volume of water called for in the instructions.

Using slightly less moisture with a standard-issue boxed cake mix will help the batter stay thick enough to hold its shape without totally sacrificing the tender crumb you'd get from making the mix to specs. Most boxed mixes call for around 1 cup of water (although a few ask for slightly less). If that's the case, dial the water down to around ¾ cup for your next round of whoopie pies. While you're at it, an easy oven trick for your boxed cake mix is to bake a little longer at a lower temperature to get a flatter, more even layer from your scoops of batter. and achieve bakery-quality status. These are simple adjustments, but they can make a huge difference without any extra steps or ingredients.

There are a lot of ingredients that can make a boxed cake taste homemade or bakery level, however, and another easy trick to making perfect whoopie pies is to add some instant pudding mix to the batter. Pudding mix is simply starch, usually some type of modified food starch like cornstarch (like in this easy classic vanilla pudding recipe), mixed with flavor and sugar. The extra starch in the pudding mix absorbs some moisture in the cake batter to give it density and structure. The pudding also gives the cake a softer, more tender crumb that's still strong enough to hold up as a handheld. Around 2 tablespoons of dry, instant pudding mix per box of cake mix is enough to make a difference. That small amount (around half a small package) gives the mixture structure and moisture without changing the flavor, but it's also fine to experiment with up to ¼ cup of pudding mix to find a whoopie pie consistency you like. Anything more than that and you're likely pushing into brownie territory.

An added bonus for using dry pudding mix in your whoopie pie cakes is you can use what's left over in the filling. Try adding a tablespoon or so to your favorite whoopie stuffing, be it buttercream or marshmallow-style, and it will add some extra moisture, flavor, and structure without wasting the rest of a perfectly good pudding mix.