Homemade Twinkies! (gluten-free & vegan)

I am still giddy with the homemade Twinkies! Seriously, this might just be the highlight of my baking creations: ) Never mind the thousand I’ve recipes I’ve developed for my cookbooks and magazine articles. Just four words…Gluten-free vegan Twinkies!

The hardest part of this recipe is finding the Twinkie pan, which wasn’t hard to do at all. Do you have a Bed, Bath & Beyond near you? Because if you do, Wilton makes Twinkie pans and Bed Bath & Beyond has them marked down to $4.99 per pan. Yes, you heard that correctly…$4.99. I highly recommend stocking up, because when these pans go away, it can be hard to find them again. They are marked down for clearance.

To make the cakes, I greased the pan well, and filled them two thirds full. I baked them until they were golden and a tester inserted into the middle came out clean. I let them cool about 15 minutes, and then carefully removed them to a cooling rack to cool completely. To make the filling, I made a half batch of my Fluffy Lemon Cream Frosting (the recipe is on the Julie’s Original site), but I omitted the lemon and added a good vanilla extract (Nielsen-Massey), and scraped a vanilla bean in for additional vanilla punch. Next time I’m going to make a lemon frosting, because that sounds amazing and spring-like to me. I’m also planning to try filling them with lemon curd too.

To get the filling inside the cake, I poked three holes in the bottom of the cake (on the underside), and piped in the filling. I’m going to try and figure out a way to get more cream filling in the center, and will post as soon as I figure out an easy way.

Now, what are you waiting for? Go bake yourself some homemade gluten-free Twinkies!