“Dude, Where’s My Twinkies?”

 

For a snack “food” that Hostess claimed sold half a billion packages annually, manufactured in some form or other for the past 80+ years by a company whose Board and Management late last year took it for a power dive into the ground (with a stiff tailwind courtesy of labor unions), there seems to be no successor in a hurry to step up and address Hostess Twinkies’ disappearance from the US consumer market.

Hostess’ demise has left many, many consumers seeking an alternate or replacement to the (in)famous Golden Sponge Cake with Creme Filling.
 

A Twinkies Pretender: Mrs. Freshley’s
Golden Creme Cakes
aka
Creme Fingers
aka
“dreamies”

Today I took a long walk to gravely ponder this important issue, briefly stopping by the neighborhood QFC, a once-great Pacific Northwest regional grocery chain that sold out out some time back to the Kroger conglomerate.
 
Lo, there on the formerly Hostess-occupied shelf in the Bread aisle was twin- and 6-packs of Mrs. Freshley’s dreamies (yes, in modest lower case). The classic two-pack golden torpedo-shaped cakes caught the eye, and I wondered whether they could possibly fill the cold, empty shoes of Twinkies.

With some apprehension I examined the Nutrition Facts and Ingredients. Hmmm... at first glance does not seem to be worse than Twinkies in the additive department (2% or less!): in fact, possibly better, as the Yellow 5 and Red 40 dyes have been replaced by turmeric and annatto vegetal colorants. Well, that’s a start. $1.59 later I took them home for a checkout.
 
  Alas, it was not to be. Our family sensory-evaluation panel judged them to be a sad, distant second to authentic Twinkies. Recorded descriptors for dreamies include Coarse, Gritty, Unpleasant, Once-Only, Derivative, Plastic-Smelling, and Headachey—is that even a word?

Structurally, the cake’s sponge was uneven and dry, holding an abrasive, feathery-foamy filling about 1/3 the volume of a Twinkie’s. A true Twinkies aficionado would, after the first bite, have to be pretty desperate to choke one of these babies down.
 
  Mrs. Freshley’s is a line of snack foods developed for the vending-machine market, one brand of many owned by Flowers Foods of Thomasville, Georgia USA. Golden Creme Cakes, Creme Fingers, and “dreamies” all seem to refer to this same product, depending on which internet resource you visit. One can imagine harried supermarket wholesale buyers glancing at the Missus’ golden sponge cake promo shot and unhesitatingly ordering 100 gross for store shelves.

A Brief Glance Under the Hood:
Twinkies vs. “dreamies”

As innumerable websites, blogs, and even Steve Ettlinger’s 2008 book Twinkie, Deconstructed describe, certain baking industry additives are not to be found in any domestic kitchen, or would not be expected to make their way into a human-made, from-scratch sponge cake:
 

Excerpted from Hostess Brands’ last-published Twinkies ingredients list:

• Artificial Flavors

• Calcium Caseinate

• Cellulose Gum

• Diglycerides

• Glucose

• High Fructose Corn Syrup

• Modified Corn Starch

• Monoglycerides

• Polysorbate 60

• Red 40 dye

• Sodium Caseinate

• Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate

• Sorbic Acid

• Soy Flour

• Soy Lecithin

• Soy Protein Isolate

• Sweet Dairy Whey

• Yellow 5 dye

• Calcium sulfate

• Corn dextrin

Each and every one of these substances—deemed just fine, dandy, and GRAS by the US FDA—serves a functional and commercial purpose, none of which has to do with nutrition per se.
 

Wheat flour, sugar, eggs, maybe a little whole milk or butter, natural vanilla, salt, and normal leavening can, with the correct techniques, make a lovely fresh sponge cake you can fill with whipped cream just before you eat it. But with a shelf life of about half an hour, a Twinkie it ain’t.

 

Excerpted from Mrs. Freshley’s “dreamies” ingredients list:

• Artificial Flavors

• Cellulose Gum

• Diglycerides

• Dextrose (aka Glucose)

• Corn Syrup

• High Fructose Corn Syrup

• Modified Corn Starch

• Monoglycerides

• Polysorbate 80

• Turmeric extractive

• Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate

• Sorbic Acid

• Potassium Sorbate

• Soy Flour

• Soy Lecithin

• Soy Protein Isolate

• Whey Lactylate

• Annatto extractive

• Citric acid

• Caramel color

• Xanthan Gum

Compared to a classic Twinkie, each “dreamie” is about 7% lighter, with about 10% fewer total calories, 25% fewer calories from fat, 7% fewer total carbs, and about 20% less in sugars. Evidently swapping out some of the Twinkies’ 20 weird additives and adding another one to boot gets you quite a bit less cake, and, by majority vote, a far less enjoyable one.

Reimagining a Post-Industrial Twinkie

The world has moved on from the additive-laden industrial paradigm that made the original Twinkie, its siblings, and its imitator-artifacts even remotely possible.
 
  So, after some research and imaginative speculation, I have decided to formulate, bake, and debug a Twinkie Similitude that eschews the creeping chemicalization of the Hostess era. I believe One Year should suffice to create something solely from food ingredients, satisfactorily and truthfully sporting a Clean Label to boot.
 
  Polite comments, suggestions, and non-rude NOT-winkies names cheerfully accepted and considered!

  Coming up: getting the additives out & actual food back in...

Beekeeping for Poets