They say you can’t pick the family you’re born into. You never know when you take your first breaths out of mom’s belly who you’re relatives will be. They could be Mimes. Circus people. Car thiefs. The possibilities are endless.  I myself was born into a family of bakers. For as long as I can remember, desserts were the main event for every gathering. No one got excited about the Holiday Ham or the Green Bean Casserole. It was a race to finish the ‘main meal’ so you could get to the good stuff  – the dessert .

And Grammy Murphy was the matriarch of the baking dynasty that is our family – the ‘bake’triarch if you will. She did it all – pies ( homemade crusts obviously), cookies cakes and her signature dish, the one the only Whoopie Pie. Sometimes there were sprinkles on the edges – sometimes they were plain. They came in all shapes and sizes usually, but as sure as the sun rose and set, there were always Whoopie Pies Home Design.

It wasn’t until she passed away right before Christmas that I finally got the recipe – handwritten on one of her kitty recipe cards, in her handwriting, with even some long division at the bottom, probably in an effort to figure out how many batches to make for Christmas or E

They’ll probably never taste the same as they did at my Grandparent’s house on Christmas Day, surrounded by the chaos of aunts, uncles, cousins, new toys and mounds of krinkled gift wrap.  But every time I pull up the recipe, with those kittys staring back at me, and stand over my Kitchen Aid watching the shortening, cocoa powder, and fluffernutter come to life, it’ll bring me right back to watching Gram do the very same thing in her magical kitchen, dreaming of the day when I’d be old enough to make my very own batch iphone screen protector.