The "With A Bit Of Sugar...All Is Made Well: Part I - The Hostess Twinkie" Story

Preface: Many years ago I developed a taste for items made with sugar; donuts, long johns, wacky cake, banana split dessert, chocolate chip cookies, donuts, candy bars, Twinkies, sugar cookies, licorice, caramels, donuts, Necco wafers, Swedish fish, Tastycakes, double-bubble gum, Chuckles, Mary Janes, Twizzlers, donuts, etc., etc...and the list goes on and on.  My story today is about one of those favorites, Twinkies, since they have been around for 90 years.  Tomorrow I will treat you to a story about one of Lancaster's sweetest products, Twizzlers.  Enjoy!

It was an ordinary day.  Searching for a few packs of Hostess Twinkies to dunk in a glass of milk.  Most of the shelves in the local grocery store have been emptied by food and dessert hoarders due to the ever present threat of the Coronavirus.  And...today is no different...since there are NO Twinkies on the shelf.  What can I do about my sugarvirus?  My taste for the old-time Twinkie was recently rekindled when "Reminisce" magazine featured a story about the sweet treat.  They had a headline that read: GOLDEN OLDIE STILL FRESH AT 90 - Fit for a wedding or a murder trial, Twinkie delights!  Years and years ago you could always find a single pack or a value party pack somewhere in a kitchen cabinet, but with the advent of a variety of other new and interesting treats, Twinkies were only purchased about once a month.  

The Twinkie was developed as a budget snack cake due to its inexpensive price.  The Twinkie achieved a status high enough that it was placed in the Millennium Time Capsule.  That was until a few staff members who were packing the time capsule decided that the sugary treat might eventually draw rodents, grabbed them from the capsule and devoured all of them.  

How can you NOT like one of these?

Then, somehow in 2012, Hostess Brands fired most of its workers and went out of business.  NO MORE TWINKIES!!  Luckily, the new owner of the business relaunched the making of the Twinkie.  The success of the original product 90 years ago had to do with the fact that it was a feather-like sponge cake filled with sweet cream.  Who would have guessed that something as simple as that could have been such a success.  

The inventor of the Twinkie. James Dewar.

The Great Depression did have something to do with that, since the treat was so simple and inexpensive that it was actually affordable to the masses even during a time of fiscal hardship.  The guy who "invented" the Twinkie, James Dewar, used his bakery's shortcake pans which sat idle during most of the year, since strawberries were only in season for about one month of the year.  The original Twinkies, which I do not remember, were made with a banana filling, but when WWI came along, bananas were replaced with a vanilla cream, thank goodness.  

Buffalo Bob Smith, Howdy Doody and
Clarabell Clown pushed Twinkies on TV.

I can still remember watching Buffalo Bob Smith on the Howdy Doody Show telling me to ask my mom to get Twinkies at the store and put one in my lunch pail.  When the Twinkie was first made it was stuffed by workers who at times added too much filling and caused the treat to explode.  What a job...having to eat all that excess stuffing so it wouldn't go to waste!  And, when people began to make fallout shelters in there basements in the late 1940s, Twinkies were the perfect item to stock in them since they had a shelf-life of close to two months.  Originally the Twinkie was said to be bad for you due to all the sugar in it, but that recipe was changed and today has 39 ingredients, eight of them being corn-based.  Now it is much better for you.  That is probably the reason why I couldn't find any at the grocery store today.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.