Take Heart, Twinkie Lovers

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The headline, listed as part of the daily news rundown at CNN.com, was simple, stark, and alarming: “Twinkie Manufacturer Files for Bankruptcy.”


That would be the Interstate Bakeries Corp., which owns the Hostess snack cake brand. It also owns Drake’s, Dolly Madison, and Wonder Bread, which is another way of saying IBC is rather heavily involved in the carb business. Carbs, in case you haven’t noticed, aren’t exactly a growth industry these days. And that’s how IBC came to file for Chapter 11 protection last month.


I don’t know about you, but I for one shudder at the thought of a Twinkie-free world. Yes, I should have outgrown Twinkies decades ago, but I find that I still love the sponginess of the yellow cake, the synthetic yet oddly compelling filling, the way each Twinkie’s browned bottom layer sticks to the little sheet of cardboard on which it’s packaged (all the better to be savored via a swipe of the index finger and a lick of the tongue, a key Twinkie practice that ranks among the food world’s most satisfying rituals).


Twinkies may seem like the very epitome of plastic 1950s suburban culture, but they were actually invented in 1930. The original version featured banana cream filling, but banana shortages during World War II prompted a switch to the vanilla cream that’s still used today. This isn’t the only change Twinkies have undergone – at one point they even had chocolate frosting accented with white swirls, just like Hostess Cup Cakes.


But this proud junk-food heritage will draw to a close if IBC goes belly-up. The company is continuing operations as it seeks bankruptcy protection and says it plans to reorganize, but that’s always an iffy proposition. Faced with the possibility of an imminent Twinkie shortage, or even Twinkie extinction, we appear to have two choices: The first is to amass a deep Twinkie stockpile, sort of like a snack-cake version of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; the other, more intriguing option, is to make our own.


Homemade Twinkies are not a new phenomenon – recipes for them are all over the Internet. The problem has always been the lack of a truly Twinkie-shaped mold, no small matter when dealing with a form as iconic as this one. The recipes usually try to surmount this obstacle either by reconceiving the Twinkies as a layer cake that can be cut into Twinkie-sized pieces, or by calling for makeshift molds made from aluminum foil. Some of these are quite tasty, but anyone can see they’re not Twinkies.


The enterprising folks at Williams-Sonoma have addressed this problem by creating a Twinkie mold pan. They’re calling it a “Cream Boat Cakelet Pan,” but trust me – it’s a Twinkie mold pan. It takes chutzpah to charge $26 for what is essentially just a glorified muffin tin, but I know of no other mold that so faithfully reproduces the distinctive Twinkie shape. And really, who can put a price on that kind of authenticity?


It takes even more chutzpah to charge $12 for a glorified box of Betty Crocker mix, but that’s what Williams-Sonoma is charging for its vanilla cupcake kit, which is recommended for use with the Twinkie pan. It makes good Twinkies, but so does Betty Crocker’s yellow cake mix, which is a lot cheaper and easier to obtain.


If you want to make your Twinkies from scratch, the Williams-Sonoma pan is accompanied by a recipe (shown at right) that produces the best homemade Twinkies of all. The cake strikes just the right balance between firmness and sponginess, between sugar and vanilla. If Twinkies ever disappear from retail shelves, you can use this recipe without missing a beat.


Except for one niggling problem: the cream filling. Making the filling isn’t hard, but getting it into the Twinkies is. Most home recipes call for using a pastry bag to shoot the filling into the cake, which is problematic on several levels: Many people don’t have a pastry bag (although the Williams-Sonoma cupcake mix comes with a cheap plastic one); they’re very clumsy to use; and they don’t penetrate far enough into the cake to get the filling into the center of the Twinkie.


After experimenting with a few other cream delivery systems (including one of those big metal syringes used for injectable marinades, which ended up getting all clogged with the filling), I came up with something that works pretty well: a turkey baster, which functions nicely as a filling injector and is long and narrow enough to stick deep into the center of the Twinkies.


If you’d rather not make your own filling, you can use Reddi-wip. It’s a little lighter than standard Twinkie filling, but it’s still pretty good, and you can just stick the nozzle directly into the cake and dispense the product. Just be sure to use a light touch – if you squirt too much Reddi Wip in there, the Twinkie will burst apart.


My homemade Twinkies compare favorably with the real thing, but mass-produced Twinkies still have one advantage: the little sheet of cardboard and its attendant finger-swipe ritual. I was going to try to duplicate this by testing various types of cardboard, but in the end I decided not to bother. Some things are too sacred to tamper with.


The New York Sun

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