Housewares Business-to-business magazine for housewares retailers and their suppliers
Cupcakes may be big news in home baking, but it seems they could soon have a rival – the whoopie pie.
Whoopie pies, or whoopie cakes, are said to have been invented by the Amish in the US, where they are now hugely popular – as Gary Gordon points out in his August blog.
Slightly bigger than cupcakes and hamburger-shaped, they consist of two sponge-like biscuits sandwiched together with buttercream or a mix of buttercream and marshmallow. The biscuits are made simply by dropping spoonfuls of the sponge mix onto a baking tray. The pies are traditionally left plain on top but they can also be iced and decorated.
Whoopie pies are fast gaining ground in the UK, and are now sold in Sainsbury’s, M&S and Harrods. And in the current issue of The Grocer, Gill Davies of cake mix supplier Dr Oetker’s reports: “We’d seen them in trend tracking for some time and there had been a lot of talk on the internet around them. It was clear people were getting excited about them so we got a recipe out pretty sharpish on our website and it’s currently the most sought-after recipe.”
The Grocer also notes the rise of home baking in general. It says that sales of home baking ingredients have increased 9.1% in value over the past year and are now worth £381m, and 3% in volume. This has been driven by consumers shopping the category more often and buying more on each trip. The magazine also says that there is particularly strong growth in baking fruits.
