"hostess" news and stories

I devoured these as a kid*. They were one of the regular junk food items my sister and I would buy at the store down the street to eat while watching The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family on Friday nights. I saw them at the store the other day and decided to pick up a box.

Originally launched on March 18th, 1967, Hostess Ding Dongs are celebrating 40 years this week as one of America's favorite treats. According to their website, Ding Dongs, (also known as King Dons and Big Wheels depending where you are from) were named for the chiming bells used in vintage Hostess commercials. They have been a staple in children's lunch boxes for decades, and more recently have been the focus of wedding and other celebratory cakes.

I'll be honest, since I've never really been much of a chocolate fan I'm probably one of the very few people on this continent that has never actually ever tasted one. I know, you're going to tell me they are rich, creamy, and delicious - I'll have to take your word on it. Though adding additional sugary-sweet products to already-prepared desserts sounds a little excessive to me, in the spirit of their anniversary I'll leave you with a recipe that features this chocolaty snack cake.

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It looks like the 100-calorie packaging trend that started last year is still going strong. Since they already put every kind of cookie, cracker, chip and other salty snack that they could think of into the portion controlled packaging, the manufacturers are branching out. Hostess, for instance, is launching a line of 100-calorie snack cakes.

The Hostess snacks are three miniature cakes in one package and come in three flavor, including carrot cake with cream cheese icing, yellow cake with chocolate icing and chocolate cake with chocolate icing. All three flavors are cream-filled. Predictably, they are being marketed towards women with the tag line "3 cakes. 100 calories. Real satisfaction."

The interesting thing about the launch of the cakes is that Hostess products are not particularly high in calories to begin with, although snackers certainly don't get three cakes for 100 calories. A regular Hostess chocolate cup cake has only 180 calories, while Twinkies, the brand's most famous offering, have only 150 calories per cake.

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Nutritionist Bonnie Minsky carries around a prop with her when she has speaking engagements: a cupcake. You wouldn't think that a dietitian would want to have a treat like this around her, especially since it is the processed, packed-in-plastic type of snack cake, but she uses it to make a point about the dangers of trans fats. You see, the Hostess cupcake that she carries is 25 years old. The plastic packaging didn't hold up too well, nor did the frosting, but the cake itself appears to be relatively undamaged.

The cake was intended to be an experiment from the beginning. She purchased the cake in 1981 and "let it site for a few months" to see what would happen. She also purchased an apple at the same time. Of course, the apple began to decompose in fairly short order, but nothing happened to the cupcake. She attributed the lack of change to the presence of partially hydrogenated oil - a.k.a. trans fats - because "the [other] ingredients in the cupcake are all real."

Minsky thinks that the recent moves in Chicago and New York, as well as other cities and countries around the world, to ban trans fats are a good idea. And after seeing what they can do to a cupcake, even if there is no definitive answer about what they do to your body, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

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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.

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