My Twinkie Defense (Featuring "Will the Real Twinkie Please Stand Up?" Quiz)

The New York Times had an item about Twinkies today, on the occasion of their 85th birthday, so I'm reposting ye olde post about same. Enjoy!

Yes, I made Twinkies.

It was a confluence of events that brought me to this new high (low?).  Last week, while walking in my neighborhood, I came upon a brand new Twinkie pan (who knew these even existed?) that someone had left in front of their brownstone.  So I trash-picked it (as we say in Brooklyn).  And then, the very next day, Twinkies were in the news: Hostess Brands, which has made Twinkies since the 1930s, had filed for bankruptcy.  With such an iconic American cake at risk, I felt compelled to bake some.

And now, we break to bring you the Will the Real Twinkie Please Stand Up? quiz.  In the two pictures below, can you identify which is the commercial Twinkie and which is home-baked?  (Answer at the end of the post.)

There are all manner of Twinkie recipes online; I used one from a wonderful blog, Joy the Baker.  Joy also provides instructions to make Twinkie molds, just in case you can't find your Twinkie pan.

The homemade version is delicious, though never having eaten a real Twinkie, I have no basis of comparison.  One thing for sure -- the homemade version is much healthier, using just nine very recognizable ingredients: flour, butter, eggs, sugar, milk, etc.  The commercial product uses more than 30, many of them unpronounceable, some of them, supposedly, made from five kinds of rocks.

In a terrific story in yesterday's New York Times, William Grimes deconstructs the Twinkie, reminding how it figures into American history and culture, from the Twinkie defense (in the Dan White murder trial) to its near inclusion in the National Millennium Time Capsule.

 I thought I might be overfilling the molds, and the finished product, below, proved me right.  But it's easy to slice off the overflow cake with a serrated knife.  And the scraps are pretty good.

The recipe for the cream filling is also at the Joy the Baker site.  It involved Marshmallow Fluff and butter, and is quite tasty.  Below is the possibly endangered Hostess display at my local bodega.

Ok:  Were you right?  In both pictures, the home-baked Twinkie is on the right.

Sad News on the Pastry Labor Front

A great first line in a New York Times story today says it all:
"While Twinkies have a reputation for an unlimited shelf life, the company that makes the junk food does not."

And so Hostess, to break a strike,  is shutting down all its plants,  a sad day for pastry and an even sadder one for the labor movement and workers in America.  (The company is even closing the Dolly Madison plant which employs 200 in Columbus, Indiana, where I spent 18 months as a newspaper reporter.)

Now the only way to get a Twinkies fix is to make them yourself.  Here's a link to a previous post in which I did just that.  You can also Google a recipe for Hostess cupcakes.  (Below are some I made a while back.)