This time it was a friend from church who posted a link to a website called Instructables that gave (shocker) instructions for how to make fake Twinkies. He posted it because I've made fake Twinkies a few times in my "cream canoe" pan and brought them to church. Church people are quite taken with my Twinkies - I can make the exact same cake and filling in both Twinkie and cupcake form and the Twinkies go tons faster.
Inspired by that I decided to hold a Twinkie Tasting last Monday. I invited tons of people from church and made five types of Twinkies:
1. "Al" - the pound cake mix-based official copycat recipe from the Instructables, but filled with the cooked filling from the cream canoe pan's instructions, which I thought was quite similar to the real Twinkie filling
2. "Billy Bob" - a butter yellow cake mix filled with whipped cream
3. "Cletus" - the King Arthur Flour snack cake recipe, which had a very eggy cake and another cooked filling
4. "Dusty" - the organic vegan cake recipe from the Instructables paired with the Instructables gluten-free filling (which was just frosting), except the cake wasn't actually organic because Abby don't do that crap, though I did use real soy milk and maple syrup.
Here's a picture taken by the friend who originally posted the Instructables, Francis:
Cletus is the main focus and then Dusty is in the foreground. Cletus won on similarity to real Twinkies, which I had available for comparison, and Dusty tied with Cletus for taste. With all its weird ingredients Dusty had more actual taste. I would make that recipe again but probably try to substitute real milk for the soy milk and work out some ratio of brown sugar and water for the maple syrup because that stuff's expensive!
I thought it was very interesting that many of the guests had never had real Twinkies before, and also how much everyone disliked them, especially in comparison to the homemade ones. I was also surprised how much people liked the tater tot casserole I served beforehand. Since I had scheduled the tasting for 7 I thought I should provide dinner, but it needed to be easy since five batches of homemade Twinkies is a lot of work. And I was very taken with the Too Easy Hotdish recipe given in the most recent Hannah Swensen mystery novel that I listened to on book-on-tape on the way back from Oceanside after my work trip. A layer of ground meat, a layer of cream-of-something soup, a layer of tater tots, a scattering of cheese and bake till bubbling. Even though I automatically browned the meat and turns out you don't need to, it turned out very good.
Strangely, one of the guys at the party tasted it and asked, "Is this ground beef 80/20? 90/10? No, 80/20?" Even though it was browned he could identify the fat content! I was also forced to admit I bought the cheap stuff at Safeway but that was all right.
Talked to Bonnie this weekend about our camping trip in a few weeks. I haven't gone camping since middle school Girl Scouts so I wasn't sure what exactly you do when you camp, besides hike. Bonnie says she normally brings a big pile of magazines and sits around and reads.
Man that sounds fantastic. I'm looking forward to that more than ever. Also, I just found out you can check out magazines from the library. Only for a week, but I plan to make that work. Magazines ahoy!
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