Here’s How To Make Twinkies At Home (That Are Better Than The Real Thing)

Even if you've never liked Twinkies, you'll like these Twinkies.

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Hi, we're Chrissy and Kristin, and yes, we like Twinkies, but we're pretty sure their shelf-stable magic cannot be duplicated at home.

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On top of this, we are two people who would need a license to use an Easy Bake oven.

But as it turns out — even us two dodos were able to make Twinkies that were better than the original (using this recipe from the New York Times), and we live to tell the tale (AKA eat them all).

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Here's what we used to make the cake part: (Don't be scared. It's worth it!)

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And here's what we used to make the iconic creamy filling:

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You'll also need:

* aluminium foil

* a mixer/stand mixer

* a spice container (that is at least vaguely twinkie shaped)

* a chop stick

* pastry bags (or ziplock bags)

* the willpower to not eat the filling out of the bowl

Step 1: We cut 12 squares of aluminum foil and folded them around a spice container to make little molds for the cakes, and we sprayed them with a crap load of cooking spray.

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Basically, we made 12 little coffins with the same spice bottle — but if you can't get the spice container out of the mold after you make it, then you made the mold too tight.

Step 2: We melted butter and milk together in a saucepan. Then, we took it off the heat and added vanilla, covered it, and put it aside.

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Don't forget and accidentally clean this pan.

Step 3: We beat the egg whites and slowly added half the sugar and all the cream of tartar until it formed soft peaks.

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After you've got soft peaks (basically lil' nipples in your egg whites), you can pour the egg whites into a separate mixing bowl (also no need to clean the standing mixer bowl —which is good because we hate cleaning. Cleaning SUX.)

Step 4: You still with us? GOOD. Next, we beat the egg yolks with other half of the sugar until it was thick and looked pastel yellow.

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Like a gender-neutral nursery.

Step 5: We added the egg whites back in with the egg yolks. After that, we added a mixture of the dry ingredients (cake flower, all purpose flour, baking powder, and salt). THEN: We mixed it all together on low for 10 seconds.

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Remember the melted butter mixture from before that hopefully you did not accidentally throw out? After you're done with the stuff from above, you make a well in one side of the batter and pour the butter mixture in and then fold it in with a spatula.

Step 6: We poured the batter into the little aluminum cake coffins and stuck them in the oven at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes.

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Macey J. Foronda/BuzzFeed

SOOOOOO, it was at this point that we realized we accidentally replaced the flour with powdered sugar (they are the same color, OK?), and we ended up with a bunch of crispy sugar puddles. Don't do this.

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After we redid the recipe correctly (and cried a lot), we poured the batter into the molds, stuck it in (and took it out) of the oven, we then moved onto the ~FILLING STAGE~.

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Step 9: We then threw all the filling ingredients together and beat them until smooth. After, we took a chopstick and poked little holes into the bottom of each cake. Then, we put the filling into a pastry bag and filled the little cakes with frosting.

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We found it was important here to make pretty big holes with the chopsticks, or else there's nowhere for the frosting to go. We "accidentally" got it all over our hands. And our mouths.

All in all, the recipe took about 2 hours. But damn, after trying our homemade masterpieces, the store-bought Twinkies kinda tasted like pennies.

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Ours actually tasted like a reverse cupcake.

The ratio of cream to cake is a little less with the homemade ones, so it doesn't utterly destroy your stomach.

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Unless you're into that kind of thing.

Overall, it was totally, absolutely worth doing the whole goddamn recipe twice.

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JEEZ THESE WERE GOOD.

And here's the entire recipe if you want to go on your own magical Twinkie adventure. HAVE FUN, YA TWINKIES.

Macey J. Foronda / Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed