Not So Yankee Doodle Dandy

You might hate these things by now, wondering why you
ever ate them in the first place, but when offered the opportunity,
you'd still eat them. And then hate yourself later.
What? Okay, just me, then.

Now, where were we? That's right...it's been a while. I'll skip the "I haven't blogged in a while wow what a lazy person I am" prologue and get right to it.

HERE'S WHERE I GET RIGHT TO IT
Due to the nature of the distribution of chores and responsibilities in the The Anthony Show household, I am rarely if ever involved in the weekly acquisition of foodstuffs and sundries.

Mrs. The Anthony Show prefers it that way. Now that the kids are old enough that I can keep an eye on both of them by myself without the missus worrying that one child may shove the other child into an outlet, she usually hits the supermarkets (generally, Trader Joe's and Stop and Shop) on her own.

It's like a private vacation! For her, that is. Anyway, she always returns from her supermarket odyssey with a number of treats that would never be found in my parents' house when I lived there, unless they were smuggled there via the body cavities of sympathetic friends and relatives.


YES I WOULD CONSIDER EATING A BODY CAVITY–SMUGGLED TWINKIE AS LONG AS THE TREAT REMAINED SUFFICIENTLY PROTECTED IN ITS WRAPPER
I should note here that neither of my kids is overweight — in fact, my energetic Son Of The Anthony Show is on the low end of average weight for a 7-year-old — and they tend not to overindulge. Unlike their father.

But enough about my skinny kids and their SlothDad. The point is, I've been thinking about the kinds of treats that I grew up with, and how they added to whatever inferiority complex that might still lingers in my psyche today.

Growing up, my house was not completely sweet-free. My parents often bought packaged baked goods, but it was almost never the major-league Hostess stuff like Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes. We always had to settle for the second-tier stuff from Drake's and (gag) Tastycake,

I always thought that economics played a part in these buying decisions, since we were the family that shopped for clothing at Sears, but I later learned that my father (who, rather than my mother, did the food shopping for as long as I could remember) grew up with these inferior cakes and had no interest in the Hostess family. In fact, when my father was hanging out with a crew that cruised to Latin dance clubs in long-finned cars that you'd see in a exterior shot of a Mad Men episode, his penchant for Yankee Doodles was so prevalent that his nickname was "Cupcake." (Disclosing that little tidbit of history has likely reduced my eventual inheritance by at least a third.)

Have you ever had a Yankee Doodle?

I'm not even going to expand the size of this image...

There it is. If you were to muse, "That looks like a Hostess CupCake, only with the chocolate-and-swirly-white-icing top removed," you'd be mostly correct. And you'd be sad, because the CupCake top is like the best part of the whole thing, whether you ate the CupCake like any normal cupcake or first removed that luscious top by peeling it off with your hand or gently scraping it off with your teeth.

The only possible advantage that the Yankee Doodle has over the CupCake is that the former comes in a pack of three, while the latter arrives in pairs — that's only if you're allowed to enjoy the trio of Yankee Doodles on your own and weren't required to eat only one, and allow your siblings to consume the other two.

DEEP-FRY A DEVIL DOG AND YOU MIGHT SUMMON SATAN HIMSELF
Drake's never had a Twinkie equivalent, but the company's signature product, another favorite of Dad's, is the Devil Dog:

...BUT THE IMAGE OF THIS DEMONIC CHIHUAHUA I WILL MAKE AS LARGE AS POSSIBLE

Wow, does that ever look delicious. It's probably related to a whoopie pie, which I don't believe I've ever tried. Our house was usually stocked with Devil Dogs and Yankee Doodles, but it was easier to sneak a Devil Dog because they were individually wrapped and a missing Devil Dog was harder to notice than a big three-pack of Yankee Doodles.

At any rate, neither the Devil Dog nor the Yankee Doodle was particularly satisfying, but either fulfilled the minimum requirements of what could be defined as a "snack." I'd be jonesing for a snack and grab the only thing in the house that had chocolate ingredients (besides Mom's unsweetened baking chocolate — which always looked tempting despite multiple failures trying to eat one of the squares — or, when I was really desperate, the tub of chocolate sprinkles purchased sometime before 1982).

The problem with both Dog and Doodle was what happened after the first couple of bites: because the cakes are so dry, even when fresh, they tend to form giant cocoa clumps that stuck to the roof of your mouth unless you had a large beverage handy or were blessed with overactive salivary glands.

THERE MIGHT BE A POINT TO ALL THIS
What I'm getting at is, the Drake's cakes were always second-class, and I always felt second-class eating them. Imagine asking your parents for an iPad and getting a Kindle Fire or, worse, some shit tablet by Sylvania or Tandy or whatever Radio Shack calls their house brand these days.

And this is why, whenever I'm in a 7-Eleven and I see a package of CupCakes or Suzy Q's or the holy grail itself, the Chocodile, I have to resist every impulse to grab it and devour the contents, leaving only a wrapper, the insides of which I'm licking as I pay the horrified clerk.

CODA
Interestingly (or not), Drake's is actually, thanks to a number of business transactions, owned by Hostess. And Drake's did create its own Twinkie knockoff, called Shortcakes then (strangely) Zoinks. Some chef-blogger named Jon Endelman reprinted his comparison of the Twinkie and the Zoink from his college newspaper 20 years ago (spoiler alert: the Zoink wins), which makes me glad I'm not the only person ranting about the Hostess–Drake's debate from a couple of decades ago.