Happy Birthday Twinkie!

The Twinkie celebrates 75 golden years

This month, the little cream-filled, yellow spongecake celebrates its 75th birthday -- and no, it's not because the same ones have been on the shelf for that long. That's just one of the urban myths surrounding the snack cakes that were invented in 1930.

Back then, James Dewar, manager of Chicago's Continental Bakery, wanted to find another use for his company's shortcake pans. He decided to fill the small, oblong cakes with a banana-cream filling and name them after the ''Twinkle Toe'' shoes he saw on a billboard in St. Louis. Banana cream-filled Twinkies -- selling two for a nickel -- debuted as part of the Hostess baked-goods line. During World War II, when there was a banana shortage, the filling flavor changed to vanilla.

By the 1950s, Twinkies had become a school lunchbox staple. In 1999, President Clinton and the White House Millennium Council selected the Twinkie to be preserved in the nation's millennium time capsule, calling it an enduring American icon.

Nutritionists scoff at them for being fatty and sugary, but that doesn't keep Hostess from turning out about 1,000 per minute. And just in case you wondered exactly how that happens, the cakes are baked for 10 minutes, then the cream filling is injected through three holes in the top, which is browned from baking. The cake is flipped before packaging, so the rounded yellow bottom becomes the top.

The Twinkie factory is still in Chicago, which also happens to be the American city with the highest per capita consumption of Twinkies. Chicagoans who want their Twinkies gussied up can go to comfort-food restaurant Kitsch'n for Twinkie Tiramisu. Or they can get a fat infusion at hot dog shop Swank Frank, which sells those state fair favorites, deep-fried Twinkies.

The cakes' sturdiness and longevity have led to the myth, say Hostess officials, that Twinkies have a shelf life measured in years, even decades. Roger Bennatti, a science teacher at George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, Maine, kept one perched atop his chalkboard for 30 years. ''It's rather brittle, but if you dusted it off, it's probably still edible,'' he told the Associated Press when he retired last year.

In reality, Twinkies' shelf life is more like 25 days, says Theresa Cogswell, who calls herself the Twinkie guru and is vice president for research and development at Interstate Bakeries, the parent company of Hostess. She admits she got a good laugh out of the 30-year-old Twinkie story but says she wouldn't want to eat one quite that old. ``You can eat older Twinkies, but they're just not as good as when they're fresh. Then they're awesome.''

Still, a 25-day shelf life is pretty long. That's because Twinkies contain no dairy-based ingredients. Twinkies are basically flour, sugar (three kinds of it), oil, eggs and chemicals (mainly preservatives and stabilizers). They're 150 calories each, about a third of that from fat. Cogswell doesn't think that's so bad. ''There's no bad foods -- just bad quantities,'' she says.



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