And you thought the green-beret'd Girl Scouts and their cookies were enterprising little kids?

In Victorville, CA, the latest trend at schools is an underground sugar trade. With candy and other "bad" snacks banned from school campuses, kids are selling contraband Snickers and Twinkies right out of their backpacks.

According to Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School in Victorville, it's become quite a lucrative business for the dealers. Kids bring things like candy bars, soda, and even energy drinks from home in their "sack lunch" and turn around and sell them for a healthy profit, with some kids walking around school with upwards of $40 in cash.

While I understand this is a bit of a problem for the schools and parents, I have to hand it to the kids -- at least we can count on them to be very good businesspeople when they grow up.

I was always more of a Little Debbie fan. Star crunches were my absolute favorite. I still sometimes gaze longingly at them at the grocery store. I wonder how they're doing, since reports on their main competition, Interstate Bakeries Corporation, are not looking too good.

The maker of Hostess Cakes, Twinkies, and Wonder Bread has been losing sales for the last quarter at least. And in January alone the company lost $18.9 million. That's the biggest drop since Interstate Bakeries went into bankruptcy in late 2004.

I feel bad for the workers who actually make the products. They'll be the first to get hit. By the same token, I do not feel bad about what the drop in sales could mean. Hopefully people are starting to eat more wholesome and fewer processed foods. This may be a sign that consumers are moving away from foods that can last forever.

Fans of limited-edition banana-creme Twinkies rejoice! Hostess resumed selling the lightly banana-flavored treats last week and plans to keep them around.

Banana creme was the original filling of the sugar-laden sponge cake when it was first introduced in 1930. A banana shortage forced Hostess to switch to vanilla creme in the 1940s. Since then Hostess has brought back banana Twinkies, but only for limited periods of time. Most recently the fruity treats hit the shelves to promote the film King Kong. Thanks to a 20 percent spike in total Twinkie sales during the promotion Hostess decided to permanently add the flavor to its lineup. I'd like to know what these puppies would taste like wrapped in bacon and then dropped in a deep fryer.

We've seen PimpMySnack make enormous re-creations of some popular store-bought snacks and candies, but now CHOW online magazine, which officially launched to the public this week, has provided recipes for their version of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies. Of course, they call them Twinks, Ding-alings, and Little Ditsy Cream Pies. The dessert/snack cakes even have real vanilla cream fillings. For the Twinks, you'll need a Twinkie-shaped pan, and Diedre pointed us to a source last fall. And of course, once you make your Twinks, you can use them for any of the recipes in the Hostess Twinkies Cookbook.

We must be obsessed with these "make the store-bought products at home" since we've also seen recipes for homemade Oreos and Pepperidge Farm Milano Cookies.

Just because it's homemade doesn't necessarily mean it's any heathier or better for you, but still, the novelty of re-creating things that we normally buy at the store is fun. Then again, I've always thought that storebought items were originally made in the home kitchen, and were made "convenient" by mass producing them for stores. After that, we just forgot how to make macaroni and cheese and soup at home, right?

Nonetheless, if your kitchen isn't too hot to fire up the oven, try your hand at these recipes for: Hostess Cupcakes, Almost Oreos (faux-reos?!), Pepperidge Farm's Orange Milano Cookies, and Little Debbie's Oatmeal Creme Pies. We've seen a giant homemade sno-ball before, and I'm sure I've seen a recipe for Twinkies somewhere, too.

Have you ever ingeniusly re-created a storebought food at home? Let us know!

The Indiana State Fair, which has been going strong for 150 years now, is a huge event in Indianapolis, where it is held every year. While some traditions, like games, animals and bake-offs are still drawing crowds, the food that is for sale - particularly the fried food - is even more of a draw. The specialty of the Indiana State Fair happens to be deep-fried chocolate-covered strawberries, though some of the other offerings included deep fried sauerkraut and the ubiquitous deep fried Twinkies.

The fried strawberries are pictured above, kindly captured before consumption by a Flickr user and looking at the pile of fried berries, topped with even more berries, chocolate and whipped cream makes it easy to see why it's a popular fair food. But is it better than funnel cake? Better than deep fried snickers bars? What about a deep fried bacon double quarter pounder?

We all know that these foods aren't exactly health foods, but you have to admit that they are hard to resist at a fair. So tell us, what is your favorite fair food? And where can we get some?

When you think about wedding cakes, chances are that you envision a tall, elegant dessert. It has sleek sides and might be adorned with splashes of sugar roses and pounds of buttercream frosting. Even if the cake is simple, ungarnished with excesses of sugar sculpture and fondant shapes, a wedding cake will always be elegant.

At least, almost always.

More and more couples are moving away from the traditional wedding cake model, having cupcake towers so that each guest can have an individual, elaborately decorated cake. The cupcakes maintain the elegance of tradition, but allow for an infusion of fun. Even further from the standard, however, is the snack-food cake. A snack food cake can be made of anything from Twinkies to Snowballs and chocolate donuts. What I didn't realize was how much the trend towards down-market "cakes" was catching on until I saw a "cake" of homemade Ding Dongs in the New York Times wedding announcements over the weekend.

Would you have wanted this at your wedding? Are you considering it for the future? I can't say that I would want it, but I would definitely serve ice cold milk, and not champagne, if I did.

[Image NYT] 

In honor of the release of the King Kong DVD, Hostess has released some limited edition Twinkies with banana cream filling. The combination of the moist Twinkie sponge cake and banana cream actually sounds like a really good idea. Did you know that banana was the original Twinkie flavor back in 1930? The cream filling changed to vanilla - now the standard - during World War II, when there was a banana shortage. The new banana Twinkies boxes also feature a contest to win a trip to Universal Studios in either Hollywood or Florida.  It is possible that if the flavor is popular enough, it might outlast the length of the sweepstakes.

Has anybody tried these yet? I have not seen them at my local grocery store yet.

[via The Yummy Banana]

Ah, the things you can do to food under the guise of science. Combine that with the free time afforded to you at college, and the possibilities are endless. T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S., the brainchild of a couple of computer science and engineering students at Rice University, stands for Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations. These two put the infamous creme-filled spongecakes through all sorts of hell. At the right is the "rapid oxidation test." Other experiments included the "gravitational response test," the "radiation test," and the "maximum density test," which actually yielded the interesting finding that Twinkies are 68 percent air. The site doesn't appear to have been updated in quite a while. Nevertheless, their rebuttals section is still pretty funny.

I mentioned Vegan Lunchbox a few weeks ago as a really worthwhile blog. If the idea of an everyday lunch doesn't intrigue you, though, perhaps a vegan Twinkie will. That's right: vegan Twinkies. Even Sarah has been won over to the concept of vegan baked-goods after her vegan cupcake, so why not a Twinkie?

Twinkies are one of the most famous and popular snack cakes in America, a moist sponge-type cake filled with a gooey, fluffy cream. The vegan version is not "health food" by any means, but they are fresh, delicious and dead ringers for packaged Twinkies in looks, though probably better in taste. They start with a white cake batter, baked in a shaped pan, and are filled with a trans-fat free version of cream filling. I think that they look fantastic. The recipe will be available for a limited time, so go ahead and print out a copy if you want to try it. I know that I will, just as soon as I can get my hands on a Twinkie pan.

While I was searching for wedding cupcake photos for my last post, I came across this great picture. Hostess has never looked so artful, so wedding-worthy. If you've planned a Super Bowl wedding, you could do worse than to stock up on cupcakes and Sno-balls and Twinkies and re-create this bad boy. Extra points for triple Twinkie tiers, I think...

I was never much of a Twinkie girl (I prefer the chocolately swirl of the Ho Ho) but if you've ever tasted one and thought you could do the Twinkie folks one better, now you can. The Bakers Catalog sells a set that includes a filled cake pan and a decorating set for injecting the filling and adding the frosting. The quest to replicate the prefabricated flavor of the snack cake in your home is not quite so easy. A recipe for the filling can be found on Top Secret Recipes (it uses marshmallow creme as the key ingredient) and another version can be found here. The exterior can probably be replicated with any decent sponge cake recipe. Of course they won't have the ridiculously long shelf life of the orginal.

[via AZ Central]