Pumpkin Twinkies for Halloween

Well, a little good news for me and for the blog: my sweet tooth has returned! It was truly disconcerting not craving sweets for a while (although I’m sure my doctor was happy), but I found myself wanting dessert again in the last few weeks, just in time for Halloween! Actually, I have a dentist’s appointment on the 31st – I’m awaiting some comments about the futility of trying to scrape sugar off patients’ teeth when they’re just going to eat a bunch of candy later in the day.

In the spirit of sugar and Halloween, I thought I’d try to duplicate a childhood classic: the Twinkie. Even as a kid I knew these snack cakes had to be totally devoid of any nutritional value whatsoever, but it didn’t stop me from trying to convince my mom to buy me one when we passed them by in the store. I only met with occasional success (yay mom?), although the one Hostess item she flat-out refused to even consider were those funny pink coconut Sno-Balls, apparently because they looked “too artificially colored.” I mean, not like 90% of snack foods aren’t artificially colored, but I like that my mom picked a criteria that an eight-year-old couldn’t argue against.

There are quite a few “vanilla snack cake” recipes floating around the internet, most of which are based on a sponge cake or chiffon cake recipe. Makes sense to me. However, I wanted a more Halloween-y cake so I decided to add some pumpkin to the mix. It definitely gives it a less sugary, more sophisticated and autumn-like feel, not to mention I really liked the orange hue (no artificial colorings here, mom!) How to get that familiar Twinkie shape? Well, who knew there was something called a “cream canoe pan” that turns out individual cakes in the shapes of…canoes, which are coincidentally quite similar to Twinkies. If you don’t want to spring for such a specialized pan (incidentally, I found it worked quite well, if you’re wondering whether it does the job), there are also tutorials on the internet from people who’ve shaped their own molds out of aluminum foil, or you can also just use a cupcake tin. I really wanted to recapture that Twinkie feeling though, so the cream canoe pan it was.

There’s also a plethora of filling recipes out there: many of them utilize marshmallow cream to help approximate the right flavor and texture, but when I tried them out, I found that the intense sweetness of the filling overwhelmed the pumpkin cake. I think if you were going for just a basic vanilla cake flavor, it would be fine, but the more complex spiciness of the pumpkin got lost under the one-two punch of marshmallow and confectioners’ sugar. Another popular suggestion I tried, flour frosting or boiled frosting, which involves cooking flour and milk together and mixing the resulting paste with butter and sugar to make a buttercream-esque frosting, was a subtler and more suitable filling. However, feel free to try both – if you want to sugar bomb yourself on Halloween, who am I to say no?

Finally, because I can’t resist gilding the lily, I made a quick maple and bourbon glaze to drizzle over the Twinkies. I also advise pouring this glaze directly over the cakes unless you need your sugar fix, but a little bit adds a nice note to go with the spicy pumpkin of the cake.

The result is a lighter, rendition of a Twinkie – one I don’t feel quite as bad eating.

Oh, and just because I can’t resist sharing, here is Snickers our little pirate captain, all ready to greet trick-or-treaters!

Arr matey! Hope you have a happy Halloween!

The recipe for the pumpkin snack cakes is adapted from Simple Math Bakery.