Second, there’s been some confusion all along about the number of Twinkies and years left in this game. Let me clarify. The boxes of Twinkies were purchased in late January of 2004 and the first Twinkies were eaten during Levy's Organic Chemistry on February 2nd of that year. Since the cream filled cakes were at that time within their ‘fresh by’ range 2004 represents year zero. So it follows that 1 year later or when the Twinkies were 1 year old we ate Twinkie #2. Thus the year is always behind the Twinkie number by one. After today there are 2 years and 2 Twinkies left so we will wrap up the experiment in 2013 with a very stale Twinkie and a fresh one for comparison. I believe that neither Jenn will ever eat another Twinkie after that day.
Now for this years results:
I had to have the Twinkie mailed to me by my father because I left the box at his place accidentally.
At this point (Year 7, Twinkie 8) the “Pastry” was dry enough to be crumbling and patches of the outside had fallen off giving it a leprous appearance. The lettering on the package was also starting to smudge so I wasn’t in a hurry to jump in.
I couldn’t actually bite into the thing so I cheated this year and cut it (with a steak knife) in to slices- six slices each amounting to 2 bites. Here is the weird thing. Somewhere around year 3 the filling absorbed up into the Twinkie and became a sort of gooey mass in the middle. Last year that was all but gone…this year it is still there. There was definitely a core of post-filling goo throughout and some of it was still sort of kind of almost white. The goo texture is something like….maybe the nougat part of a Snickers but a little firmer? And then the outside ‘cake’ part was crusty and crumbly sort of in between toast and a crouton. As for taste….I swear to you it tastes like a Twinkie. Even without the cream filling the goo still adds that essence of vanilla and the cake still tastes like cake even though it crunches. I do want to reiterate from past years that the aftertaste is the killer. It’s something like super hyper saccharine mixed with extra evil. But it’s a delayed taste- maybe even 45 seconds- so if you eat the pieces fairly steadily you can get to the end before the nausea hits.
I personally don’t feel different other than the sense of accomplishment of having done this for 7 years now. I think the take home message at this point is that within the same package Twinkies will still degrade at different rates. Only two Twinkies Left…
(Pictures when I have proper internet. Or never if I forget.)
