Recreating Snack Cakes, Cookies and Chips at Home Comparing real Oreos, Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies, left, with their homemade counterparts, right. FOR Americans of a certain age, memory lane is paved in Ho Hos. This coiled snack cake was my gateway Hostess confection, tucked into my lunch with a wax-paper-wrapped peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. I would eat them with some slightly warm milk, courtesy of the unsmiling lunch lady, whom I would run into later in life in an unsavory darts bar. Sometimes my Ho Hos were traded for Ding Dongs, the hockey-puck shaped treats that struck me as a lowbrow alternative to my working man's tiny bûche de Noël. I moved on to Twinkies, purchased by my dad at the 7-Eleven with a Mad magazine (mine) and a pack of Merit Lights (his). This was followed by the Suzy Q, a monstrosity of cream-stuffed devil's food cake that was forever tainted after Dad used one to conceal a giant bolus of penicillin that I was unable to swallow at the advanced age of 12. Fruit pies were the lunch of choice in high school, their thin dust of white frosting jolting me after geometry class; a sugar crash would follow sometime between "Gilligan's Island" and soccer practice. And the iconic Hostess cupcake, which remains the company's most popular snack cake, sufficed as entertainment during a tedious legal seminar in college; my friends and I tried to peel off the layer of chocolate frosting without disturbing a single cake crumb beneath. Sno Balls were a bridge too far. All this led to a heavy heart when I read earlier this year that Hostess had filed for bankruptcy protection for a second time, signaling the potential demise of my former lunchtime treats. The privately held company maintains that its sales are as stable as the shelf life of a Twinkie, but according to its bankruptcy filing, Hostess has been bedeviled by pricing pressures and crushing pension and other labor costs. In my nostalgic haze, I began to wonder if I could emulate Hostess snack cakes, as well as a variety of other much-loved junk food from my past, right in my own kitchen. A quick Google search of just about any snack food will reveal a host of bloggers who have had the same idea. I set out to try some of their recipes. I began with the classic Twinkie, and toward my adventure purchased the truly extraneous baking closet item, the canoe pan, which conveniently comes with a handy cream injector. If you're serious about making authentic cakes, this is a worthwhile purchase. We describe how to make temporary ones from aluminum foil, but it's a bit of a pill. My cooking adventure does not begin with flour-dusted memories in the making with my children at my side. Another feature of my generation is our eat-as-I-say-not-as-I-did proclivities, so my children had never even heard of a Twinkie. Further, having a mom who bakes all the time, they saw no novelty in this project, preferring to instead repair to an episode of "House of Anubis." I would thus need taste testers, and turned to two colleagues: Carl H. and Eric S., whose identities I am protecting because Carl eats much like a teenager and Eric is a national security reporter of great journalistic seriousness but whimsical snack-food tastes. (Here is what I hear when I eavesdrop on Eric's phone conversations: "So, are those lethal or nonlethal?" Here is what he hears listening to me: "Is that a buttercream or really more of a ganache?") What we had here was a traditional sponge cake-style recipe, with whipped egg whites and sugar forming the base, then filled with seven-minute frosting, the marshmallow-y spread favored in many cake recipes. The thrill of the perfectly shaped cake emerging from the pan was doubled with the infusing process. I poked my little infusing gun into the bottom of the cake three times, and then injected them with cream until the cake sort of swelled slightly in my hand. Once that swelling starts, you've injected enough. I ran my project over to the neighbors, where we all squealed with delight at the familiar ooze of cream and that softly yielding vanilla cake. Delicious! Delightful! To bed! The next morning at work, the thrill was slightly gone when Eric and Carl proclaimed them delicious, but noted that the cream had been absorbed by the cake. "You seem to have had trouble maintaining the integrity of the cream cavity," Eric said. Stella Parks, pastry chef at Table 310 in Lexington, Ky., who often posts recipes for childhood treats on her blog BraveTart.com, explained the science. "The seven minute in seven-minute frosting might as well refer to its shelf life rather than prep time," she said. It's just a collection of air bubbles trapped in a net of egg whites and sugar. Within a few hours of preparation the bubbles start to collapse and the egg whites begin to revert to a liquid state, facilitating the frosting's absorption into the cake.