Weekend Baking - Spiced Cider Whoopie Pie, 1st Attempt

I am still not over with my apple-cinnamon craving.  So when I saw this Spiced Cider Whoopie Pie Recipe by Emma from Elsie's blog, I thought I want to try it too.  

However, I think I have failed in my first attempt at baking this whoopie pie. :(  Here's how I did it and I really hope to learn from this.

Ingredients:


1/2 cup softened butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/3 cup sour cream (i used all purpose cream with 2 calamansi extract)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
(a pinch of cloves -  i could not find my cloves so I disregarded this) 
2 apple (Granny Smith) peeled cored and cut into small pieces


Procedure:

1.Cream together butter and sugar
2. Add the egg, sour cream and vanilla and mix until just combined
3. In another bowl combine all the dry ingredients. Then, combine the wet and dry ingredients until there are nearly no lumps left. 
4. Stir in the apple pieces.

Can you see the consistency of my batter at the fourth picture? It was too thick. I thought that maybe there was something wrong with my batter after I stirred in the apple pieces.  But I continued anyway.

I placed spoonfuls of batter on a greased baking sheet and baked at 375 F for 15 minutes. Below is my first sheet/tray.  It has 12 pieces and they really look funny and so different from Emma's.

I wanted to see the result first before baking another tray so I waited for this to finish.  Below is the result of the first batch.  It took 15 minutes to bake this.

Below is my 2nd sheet/tray. It only has 11 pieces. I tried my best to make them smoother than the 1st batch.

And below is the result of the second batch.

For the filling... What filling!?! Well, I did not continue making the filling because the 1st batch of my "whoopie pies" was almost gone when I finished with the 2nd batch.  Dad, Mom, hubby, and my baby's nanny almost finished off the 1st batch even without the filling!

They said that there was something funny with the taste but it was delicious.  I told them to wait for the cream cheese filling but they still ate them as is.  :D  So that is why I think I failed.  My family ate these as if these were cookies! 

Where do you think have I gone wrong?  Or did I make them properly but failed to add the filling?  I am no expert baker here.  And I really want to know why my whoopie pies are so different from the pictures of my recipe source.  I'll definitely try this again some other time because Mom was already getting tired of my apple-cinnamon baked goodies.   

P.S.
Filling:

Combine 1 cup cream cheese, 2 tablespoons melted butter, a pinch of cinnamon, and 1 cup to 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar until you get the frosting consistency you prefer. :D