The Death of the Twinkie?!

I have some distressing news.  It was announced today that Hostess Brands Inc. is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as soon as this week.  This would make the second time that there was significant court restructuring for Hostess in the past few years.  This is significant.  Oh sure, it is a pretty big deal that a major company is having such huge financial problems.  But the reality is:  Hostess is the baker of the TWINKIE.  That wonderful, chemical-laden, cream-filled sweet concoction that so many of us grew up  swapping at lunch and enjoying as a fine after-school cuisine. Some of the boys could bite of the top of the Twinkie, and somehow manage to eat all of the cream out of the center, with the cake remaining completely intact.  I could never figure out how it was done.  It was one of those skills kind of like rolling your 'Rs' or doing a backward roll.  No matter how hard I tried, I was just not ever going to master those tasks.

 

In addition to Twinkies, Hostess makes the yummy chocolate cupcake with cream filling - the Hostess cupcake (does it have another name?).  Remember the delightful little white icing squiggle that swirled down the center of the cupcake?  It was always great fun to try to gently remove that squiggle, eating it first, before touching the cupcake itself.  

 

Hostess also gave us Wonder Bread... that soft, squishy, always-fresh bread.  My dad had a proclivity for the more expensive Cake Box bakery bread which was a dense loaf of bread.  Thus, Cake Box bread (always a bit on the hard side) was the foundation for our daily sandwiches.  But when I went to my friend, Judy Alexander's house, I got to feast on Wonder Bread!  There were always a lot of fun things to do at Judy's.  I will have to tell you about harvesting worms (night crawlers) from her back yard.  Don't let me forget!

 

There were a lot of things one could do with Wonder Bread.  Like removing the crust and then squishing the entire piece of bread into a small, smooshed together square of soft, squishy dough.  If you squeezed hard enough, the square of dough felt like it was raw dough again.  It was really quite magical.  And, Wonder Bread made the perfect PB&J sandwich.  It was amazingly soft!  

 

Perhaps the best culinary delight that Wonder Bread had to offer was (only at Judy's house!) the Sugar Sandwich.  Judy first offered me a Sugar Sandwich when I was about 5-years-old, and I thought it was about the most wonderful thing in the world. One of the really great things about a Sugar Sandwich, is that Judy and I could 'cook' them all by ourselves - quite a feat at 5 years of age!  

 

To create a Sugar Sandwich, one spread the bread with very soft butter (you could absolutely destroy a slice of Wonder Bread with hard butter or chunky peanut butter! Had to leave the butter dish out on the counter for a few hours.).  After a thick layer of butter was properly applied, sugar was sprinkled on top.  Not just a little sugar - a LOT of sugar.  I think the butter and sugar together were at least a quarter of an inch thick.  That's it - 3 ingredients that led to the perfect food.  When you ate the Sugar Sandwich, it had an interesting 'feel'. The sugar provided a slightly irritating crunch to each bite.  And, the sandwich was hideously sweet. Mixing the sugar and butter gave it kind of a creepy, sweet, greasy texture.  Sweet, crunchy, greasy.  It was really quite annoying. A better descriptor might be disgusting.

I did not like Sugar Sandwiches at all.  Actually, I hated them (Sorry Judy - I just could never quite tell you).   I think it is time that Hostess filed for bankruptcy.  What were they trying to do to me, anyway?!

Good-bye Hostess.

Bloomberg News

Hostess Brands has been facing a cash squeeze. Above, the company's bakery in Sacramento, Calif., last year.

A Teamsters spokesman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Hostess's other main union didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.