Things are heating up in the Top Secret R&D Lab of Browne Crowe Bakes. A special resistant-starch preparation of germ-retained rice has been turned into flour, ready for baking trials. As I type I have test quantities of sunflower kernels undergoing alchemical transformation into various emulsifier, protein, and oil preparations, with synergistic combinations possibly workable into the pre-batter phase of a chiffon-like formula.
To this end, one might wonder what the starting point must be in making any cake, especially the Golden Sponge Cake component of the NOT-winkie:
The Fundamentals of Formulæ
Professional bakers have several rules of thumb for “balancing” the proportions of cake ingredients to get the mix In The Zone of desired cake properties. The three general guidelines of cake formulation go as follows—quantities refer to weight, not volume measure:
- Sugar should equal or exceed flour (sugar>flour is called “high ratio”)
- Eggs should equal or exceed fats
- Eggs plus other liquids should equal or exceed sugar
For most published cake formulas, these rules seem to hold up pretty well. As demonstrated in previous weblog posts here (see), no useful information or conclusions can be got about the actual amounts of eggs, flour etc. in Twinkies.
What is more interesting and relevant to anybody with a college education is to look at the breakdown of specific food components—starches, fats, protein etc.—such that batter formulas can be better “tuned” to meet specific functional goals, e.g. the shelf-life of our NOT-winkies.
Analyzing the macronutrient breakdown of eight cakes in the same class as Golden Sponge Cake, and contrasting again with the bare-bones nutritional labeling of the archetypal Twinkie, we find these figures emerging (the ± is attached to the standard deviation, for all you engineers, boffins, and statistics wonks):
Component Classic Cake Twinkie
Sugars 26.3% ±3.2% 42%
Starches 19.1% ±2.4% 21%
Protein 4.9% ±0.7% 2%
Water 33.6% ±5.8% 24% (guess)
Fats 15.5% ±4.4% 11%
Digging deeper we can examine the ratios between macronutrient components:
Component Ratio Classic Cake Twinkie
Starches:Protein 4.0 ±0.6 9.0
Fats:Protein 3.2 ±0.8 4.5
Fats:Starches 0.8 ±0.3 0.5
Sugars:Starches 1.4 ±0.2 2.0
Sugars:Protein 5.5 ±0.8 18.0
Water:Sugars 1.3 ±0.4 0.6
Water:Starches 1.8 ±0.4 1.1
The notable deviations of the Twinkie well outside “natural” macronutrient measures, in both percentage content and content ratios, are no doubt made possible by all those lovely additives. I seriously doubt anyone could make a scratch-cake using the Twinkie proportions without lots of help from the Better Living Through Chemistry crowd.
Sweet Secrets to Shelf Life
As it turns out, one ratio especially relevant for shelf life is the sugar:starch figure. This should be in the range 1.5 to 3.1, so you can see right away that whereas most classic cakes sit on the low end at 1.4, the Twinkie is right there at a solid 2.0.
In the case of the Twinkie, but irrelevant to the NOT-winkie, is that underlying the rich sugar:starch ratio are the aggressive nonfood shelf-life extenders: caseinates, dextrin, HFCS, MGL & DGL, Polysorbate 60, SSL, and soy flour.
Another little card the NOT-winkie has up its sleeve comes from the old-European tradition of Honey Cakes, well-known for their staying moist and good to eat for many days if not weeks after baking. These were devised in a era when cane or beet sugar was scarce, preservatives as we know them were non-existent, and shelf-life was not a dirty word.
The trick is to replace 100% sugar with a sugar mix having a disaccharide : monosaccharide ratio of about 2:1. More likely than not, this is what Hostess did with Twinkies—although the exact proportions are unknown—where the disaccharides comprise sugar and whey lactose, and the monosaccharides glucose and fructose (lævulose) are supplied by added dextrose and HFCS. Recall that fructose is humectant, that is, it draws and holds water molecules aka moisture.
For the NOT-winkie, our natural equivalent would be to substitute, say, 1 cup (225g) of sugar with 2/3 cup sugar (150g) plus 75g÷82% sugars÷1.425g/ml = 64.2ml (1/4 cup plus 1 tsp.) honey, adjusting the formula to account for the 3 1/3 tsp. water present in the honey. Courtesy of floral sources and honey bees’ industry, honey sugars are about half fructose, so the moistness we expect will be present in the NOT-winkie as well.
I am not opposed to the use of glucose/dextrose per se, but if a non-maize dextrose source such as rice or tapioca could be found, it might find its way into the sponge and/or filling of our next-generation Golden Sponge Cake as a means of optimizing sweetness (honey can be too sweet), while maintaining a reasonable shelf life.
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