If you can't face a world in which Hostess Twinkies don't exist, here's one solution -- make your own! The Seattle Times ran the recipe over the weekend from a new cookbook called Real Snacks: Make Your Favorite Childhood Snacks Without All The Junk by Lara Ferroni.
Instead of high-fructose corn syruip and preservatives, the faux Twinkies can be made with whole wheat pastry flour and cane sugar. Or you can make them just as toxic as the real thing; that recipe's in there, too, because "healthy" and "Twinkie" are two words that just don't belong together.
Here's the recipe, if you're ambitious in the kitchen:
Vanilla Snack Cakes
Ingredients:
3/4 cup white spelt or all-purpose flour
1/4 cup ground millet or cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 egg whites
1/3 cup cane sugar
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup water
2 tablespoons safflower oil
4 egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 batch (about 1 cup) Snack Cake Creme (recipe online here)
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease a canoe-style snack cake pan. If you don't have a snack cake pan, you can use 4-ounce loaf pans. Alternatively, create your own molds out of foil by shaping double thicknesses of aluminum foil around a spice bottle and setting the individual foil pieces next to each other in a cake pan.
Sift the spelt flour, ground millet flour, baking powder, and salt together and set aside.
In a dry mixer bowl with dry beaters, beat the egg whites until stiff, about 2 minutes.
Transfer the beaten egg whites to a clean bowl and set aside.
In the same mixer bowl, add the sugar, honey, water, oil, egg yolks, and vanilla and beat for 1 minute. Add the flour mixture and beat until smooth, about 2 minutes. Fold in half of the beaten egg whites; once the first half is fully incorporated, fold in the second half.
Pour the batter into the prepared molds, filling them 2/3 of the way full. Bake until golden, 15 to 20 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through baking. Cool the cakes in the pan for at least 20 minutes, then remove to a wire rack and cool completely before filling with the Snack Cake Creme.
To fill the cakes, use a skewer or chopstick to poke 2 holes partially through the snack cake from the bottom, and wiggle around to hollow out some space. Use a piping bag fitted with a Bismarck (#230) tip or a very small star-shaped tip to fill the cake with the Snack Cake Creme.
Read the full story in the Seattle Times here.
And let me know how it works for you!
