The Hostess with the Mostest

When my husband was a boy back in Chicago, he lived close enough to his school to walk there and home again (five miles in the blowing snow, uphill both ways, according to him). His route took him past a small grocery store. He tells me he would stop every day on his way home from school and buy a Pepsi and a package of Hostess Cupcakes for his afternoon snack.

I also walked to school (not uphill either way!), but I didn’t pass a grocery store. It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have purchased a package of Hostess Cupcakes anyway. (And my soda pop choice in those days would have been strawberry Nehi.)

As the daughter of a professional baker, I never, ever ate Hostess anything. No Cupcakes. No Twinkies. No Snoballs. No Little Debbies. No Moonpies. If I wanted anything sweet, I ate one of my dad’s glazed donuts or filled bismarks.

With one exception: When our family went on our driving vacation to Colorado (which we did every summer), my dad would naturally stop for gasoline along the way. My brother and sisters and I could go into the gas station (really no little stores at most gas stations back then as there is now), and if we were lucky enough that they had a few sweet treats, we could get a package of Hostess Cupcakes or Twinkies.

I always got Hostess Twinkies, and I thought those pieces of sponge cake filled with what was likely nothing more than sweetened lard (no one worried about transfats or any other kinds of fats in those days) were the most delicious thing I would ever taste. Who knows how old they were at the point that I finally took my first delicious bite? What did it matter? The shelf life, then as now, was nearly limitless. And when that sweet filling touched my tongue, oh, it was pure heaven!

Now, as an adult, I can eat Hostess treats anytime I want. I will admit to being most tempted to bite into a Hostess Twinkie when we take a road trip. Perhaps it’s nothing more than habit. However, with all due respect to Hostess, every time I give in to temptation and eat a Hostess treat, I am disappointed. The cake is stale and the cream has a flat, metallic taste. My husband, I will tell you, still thinks they’re quite good. He, however, has never met a sweet treat he doesn’t like.

But I still dream about that sweet filling meeting the tip of my tongue when I bite into a piece of cake. Nowadays, however, I make my own filled cupcakes. No preservatives. They would be moldy in three days or so. But they will likely be gone by then.

Tonight I host my book club. We serve wine and dessert (what else do we need?). Because I am the only one in my book club that doesn’t work outside the home (I retired a few years back), I feel compelled to make my dessert from scratch. The book club members honestly do not expect me to do that. I put the pressure on myself.

Tonight they are eating Chocolate Coffee cupcakes filled with a coffee-liqueur-flavored cream and frosted in a chocolate buttercream. Grown-up Hostess Cupcakes.