Day will briefly become night when the moon passes between Earth and the sun during Monday’s solar eclipse. To mark the occasion, we have recipes for a couple of sweet treats.
As excitement began building about the eclipse, our thoughts first went to the Moon Pie, a confection with Southern roots. Then we couldn’t resist digging into our archives to find the recipe for delightful Milky Way Cake. It’s made with Milky Way candy bars, which are used in both the cake and the frosting.
Moon Pies are cookie-like sweets that the Chattanooga Bakery Inc. gets credit for inventing.
In 1917, according to moonpie.com, a traveling salesman for the bakery named Earl Mitchell visited a company store at a Kentucky coal mine, where a miner asked Mitchell for a snack “as big as the moon” that would also fit in a lunch box. Mitchell reported back to the bakery, which came up with treat named “MoonPie” (a trademarked name) that’s a combination of chocolate, marshmallow and graham cracker cookies.
The bakery marketed the product as “the original marshmallow sandwich,” and its popularity soon spread. Nowadays, Moon Pies are tossed from floats during Mardi Gras. That tradition began in Mobile, Alabama.
With the eclipse on the horizon, Chattanooga Bakery has made and shipped more than a million of its MoonPies.
Moon Pies consist of marshmallow sandwiched between graham cracker cookies The confection is then coated with chocolate. (Other coating flavors are banana and vanilla.) Though they’re similar to s’mores, the construction is different. Boxes of Chattanooga Bakery’s individually wrapped MoonPies are sold at grocery stores and big box retailers across the country.
We searched the internet for a Moon Pie recipe and found numerous mentions of this one from Garden & Gun magazine, a publication that celebrates Southern culture. It calls for using jarred marshmallow creme instead of making the marshmallow filling from scratch.
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Homemade Moon Pies
Cookie dough:
6 ounces unsalted butter
¼ cup light brown sugar, firmly packed
¼ cup cane syrup
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
1½ cups all-purpose flour
1¼ cups (about 1 sleeve) of graham cracker crumbs, ground fine
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons whole milk
Marshmallow center:
1 container (12 ounces) marshmallow creme
Chocolate coating:
1 bag (16 ounces) bittersweet chocolate
2 tablespoons vegetable oil or canola oil
In a medium mixing bowl, cream butter, brown sugar, syrup and vanilla until mixture is fluffy, about 1 minute.
In a separate bowl, combine flour, graham cracker crumbs, kosher salt, baking powder, baking soda and ground cinnamon.
With the mixer on low, gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients until dry ingredients are thoroughly incorporated. In a slow, steady stream, add the milk. Continue to mix until the dough comes together and leaves the side of the bowl.
Turn dough out onto a large sheet of plastic wrap. Flatten with the palm of your hand. Wrap the edges of the plastic wrap around the dough. Refrigerate for up to1 hour.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Turn chilled dough out onto a lightly floured work surface. You may need to let the dough sit at room temperature for 5-10 minutes to make it easier to work with. Roll the dough until it is ¼-inch thick. Cut out cookies using a 3-inch round cookie cutter. Place cookies on a prepared cookie sheet.
Bake cookies 10-12 minutes. They will still be soft when you remove them from the oven. Allow cookies to cool 10-15 minutes until you can carefully transfer them to a cooling rack. Allow cookies to cool completely before beginning the next step.
Once your cookies have cooled, spoon approximately ¼ cup of marshmallow crème into the center of 12 cookies. Top marshmallow with a second cookie, then gently press down until the marshmallow just touches the edge. Place sandwiches on a cookie sheet and chill for at least 15 minutes.
In the meantime, melt the chocolate in a double boiler or in a heat-proof bowl placed over a small pan of boiling water. Once the chocolate has melted, remove pan from the heat and allow the chocolate to cool until it is still warm to the touch, but no longer hot. Slowly whisk in the oil.
Using two forks, gently place once sandwich cookie into the warm chocolate. Turn until thoroughly coated. Then remove cookies to a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Let cookies stand until chocolate shell has completely hardened.