Weather wise, the past few days have been very odd. In fact, the whole darned winter has been a strange one. Parts of the eastern seaboard have been pelted by one storm after another, and surely New York and Washington, D.C., have received more snow than they ever thought they would get. Meanwhile, the weather in central Maine has been relatively balmy with not much snow. Even around our little house in the big woods, there are bare patches of ground that grow larger every day. Today is March 1^st, yet in some ways it has felt as though most of February was, in fact, March, that intermediate month of gray weather, mud, and gloom, when it’s not quite winter but not quite spring, either. While we are not sorry to be spared the massive snowstorms, most central Mainers are not exactly excited about the prospect of having two Marches. To our way of thinking, April is certainly not the cruelest month in Maine. That honor belongs to March.

To go right along with the weird weather we’ve been having, a tempest blew in last Thursday. While New York City, where our eldest daughter, Dee, lives, was again bombarded with snow, Maine got rain—and plenty of it—along with strong winds. It rained and rained until basements filled with water, rivers flooded, and in one town—Rockland—a roof blew off a house and blocked the main street. On our road, a huge tree came down, taking power lines with it, and we were without power for twelve hours. We felt very sorry for ourselves until we heard from our friend Bob Johnson in New Hampshire, who had been without power for two days.

On the Friday after the storm, I took our dog, Liam, for a walk. It was a sunny day and fairly warm. Water raced down the ditches—in February!—and it ran so clear that underneath the leaves and the sand were in sharp detail. Birds sang their spring songs, and the remaining snow banks, so little and dirty, had a discouraged look, as though they knew their time was soon coming to an end.

To cheer the family up, I decided to make whoopie pies, those round, little chocolate cakes filled with cream. Moist, chewy, yet made to be held in the hand as they are eaten, whoopie pies are big in Maine, and the whole family is very keen on them. Not far from where we live, there is a company—Isamax Snacks—that makes such good whoopie pies for such a reasonable price that I haven’t made them in years. Many years. In truth, since I was a teenager. Our local grocery store carries them, and whenever we are in a whoopie-pie mood, usually once a week, I just buy them.

But, as someone who likes to cook from scratch, I thought I should give whoopie pies a shot, and the weekend after the tempest—when February had felt like March, and March was still ahead us—seemed like the perfect time to tackle the project. Our daughter Shannon and her fiancé Mike came over, and the whoopie pie making commenced. I used a recipe from The Tightwad Gazette II, and we were all eagerly anticipating an afternoon of whoopie-pie indulgence.

Maybe it was the tempest. Maybe it was the weird February we just had. Maybe it was the recipe or the baking soda I used. Who knows what really happened? But let’s just say my whoopie pies won’t be competing anytime soon with the ones from Isamax Snacks. Flat and disappointing, my whoopie pies looked more like a chocolate cookie than those puffy little half-circles held together with cream that we all love so much. Mine were edible, but that’s about the best that could be said about them.

Now I have to decide how much effort I want to put into learning how to make a good whoopie pie. On the one hand, when a cook fails at making something, the best thing to do is to keep trying until he or she succeeds. Julia Child writes about how she poached so many eggs before she got the results she wanted that she and her husband Paul couldn’t bear to eat any more eggs, and they had to be flushed down the toilet. On the other hand, even though we love whoopie pies, they are a treat that should be an occasional indulgence—once a week at the most. Do I really want to make them over and over until I get them right? Unlike Julie Child, I can’t bear to throw out food that is edible but not perfect. Should Clif and I really be eating so many whoopie pies? And, finally, we have such good local whoopie pies, courtesy of Isamax Snacks, that we never have to go without.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. But this morning, I was looking at whoopie pie recipes on the Internet. While I don’t want to make any firm commitments, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to predict that I will be trying to make whoopie pies sometime in the near future.