Twinkies, Snowballs, and Cupcakes

Los Angeles, California

Last night I walked into Bogie's in Westlake Village, where I dance salsa on Thursday nights, and joined my friend, Joel, who was watching the class (there are always classes at the beginning of the night at almost all salsa clubs). The first thing he said to me was: No cake. At Bogie's, there is always, always cake. Birthdays are a big thing in the salsa community. And the law is, if it is your birthday, you get a birthday dance (scary thing where you are in the center of a circle of salseros and each one dances with you before handing you off to another who dances with you, then hands you off again -- with each salsero trying to top the other by the combinations he leads. I repeat: scary!), and you get CAKE. But, alas, there were no birthdays to celebrate on this rainy So Cal night.  And, therefore, alas again, no cake.

It was a bad time to go without cake, as it was just after Thanksgiving and everyone was more or less so over with the pie thing -- especially me as I'm not a great fan of pie (except for pecan pie and that's another post altogether). And, as I believe I've written before, nothing, nothing, nothing tastes better than cake at the end of a night of salsa dancing. I've come to the conclusion that it is something chemical -- that you have evidently depleted your body of its essential supply of: flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, and it is rewarding you for restocking by gifting you a hallucinogenic blast of flavor. Seriously, salsa and cake go together like nothing else...except things that I should probably not write about.

But again, there was no cake. I took this as some cosmic connection to the demise of Hostess. I can't even recount all the recent conversations I have had with friends about the soon-to-be-disapparating Twinkies (or are they already gone?). It's been interesting because everyone has a staunchly-defended stance on this. We have our Twinkies people, and we have our Cupcakes people. I didn't question the Twinkies people on how they ate their Twinkies (because, frankly, I didn't care). But all of the Cupcakes people (like me) recalled eating their Hostess Cupcakes the same way -- by peeling off the frosting in one layer and eating it separately. There was no dissension from this, the way you would find in, say, the way people eat Oreos. The Cupcakes-eaters all peeled frosting. Like it was the law.

And now, a word about Snowballs. I didn't run across anyone in any of these conversations who liked Snowballs. Someone commented that the pink ones were the same color as Pepto-Bismal. Then, Billy summed it up: I didn't like Snowballs because they had that membrane. Right. Foods with membranes--not the best idea on the whole. So, it is a mystery how and why Snowballs stayed in the Hostess' business plan. Perhaps it was a regional thing -- like they were the thing in, say, Arkansas. It's a mystery.

My grandmother was an amazing cook and baker. I have probably written before, that her parents had emigrated from Prague, Czechoslovakia and she had learned to bake pastries from her mother and eight older sisters (seriously). I grew up close to my grandparents both emotionally, as well as geographically. Like, walking distance. And my grandmother was always baking. So, we didn't have a lot of Hostess (or Oreos for that matter) in either house. And had we had them, they would have been Twinkies. I have a sibling who has radar for chocolate -- responding to even the sight of it as if it were poison ivy. As a result, chocolate was rarely in the house. So my Hostess experience was about using a portion of my allowance to buy Cupcakes at our neighborhood Thrifimart, in Burbank, where my friends and I would walk home, peeling as we went, and washing them down with Tab or Diet Rite Cola. Another world.

Later, when I was in college, and working an early-morning schedule at my part-time job for Prudential Insurance, I often subsisted on Hostess Donuts, the chocolate ones, for breakfast along with coffee from the office vending machine. This was WAY before there was even the thought of a Starbuck's on every corner. And also long before I gave up coffee and became a tea drinker. The good news is that I also gave up the Hostess donuts. Surely not the best breakfast to have (though I did go through a blessedly brief Krispy-Kreme phase) in terms of health and welfare.

But none of this speaks to the lack of cake last week at Bogie's. Joel confessed that he was going to drop by Jack-in-the-Box for churros after salsa. Churros -- tempting, as they would hit the right button when it comes to the sugar. But they are fried, so probably not the best choice before bedtime. Not to mention that I have a salsa wardrobe which is substantially black, and learned long ago, the hard way (after a startling experience with beignets), that one should not mix powdered sugar with black attire. So, sadly, I went home bereft of cake. But here is the thing. There is always next Thursday! With a little bit of luck, there will be cake. I just hope it's not carrot cake. That would just be too cruel. Thank you for reading my blog. Life is short, eat cake and dance. Strike that; reverse it.