Is everyone getting into the swing of back-to-school? Are you the very model of efficiency and good nutrition, whipping up tasty lunches with oodles of hidden kale? Are you using your leftovers wisely? Did you get cute little Bento lunch boxes for everyone? More importantly, are you an after school superhero?
Yes, you should prep and cube up some watermelon (which is really sweet and delish right now), and have it in the fridge next to the yogurt and the carrot sticks and hummus dip. But if you really want to make an impression on those malleable little minds, every once in a while throw caution to the autumn winds, and bake some homemade Ding Dongs.
We called them Ring Dings in Connecticut, where I grew up, but apparently the rest of the world knows them as Ding Dongs. I don’t know which is sillier…
I grew up in a house where, embarrassingly, my mother insisted on giving out tiny little boxes of raisins at Halloween. I had no street cred in a kid world where full size candy bars, distributed with the UNICEF pennies, were the norm. After a couple of years of raisin dispersal, our house was given wide berth at Halloween. There were probably invisible plague markings over our front door: Avoid this house, there be raisins here, and not the chocolate covered ones, either! (We also received new toothbrushes in our Easter baskets. The Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy were in cahoots with my mother.)
Luckily, my brother and I grew up without too many other psychic scars. We went on to college, jobs and marriage. While in college I discovered that one of my friends had the best sort of mother – one who appreciated the value of a good treat. Whenever we descended on her house, whatever the season or time of night, we could be assured of finding a pristine, still-wrapped-in-cellophane box of Ring Dings in their refrigerator, and being good and thoughtful house guests, we would devour them all with tall, cold glasses of whole milk. Remember whole milk? The Ring Dings had developed a crisp chocolate carapace from being chilled in the refrigerator, which yielded to the soft cake interior, and the creamy goodness at the center. (Twinkies, we later discovered, also benefitted from being refrigerated…)
You can tell that this eating experience made a lasting impression upon me. I vowed with all the fervor of Scarlett O’Hara that I would take a page from this family’s book, and in the future I would make Ring Dings freely available whenever we had were young house guests. And sometimes even for an ordinary after school snack. Yumsters!
But this is even better: baking your own. Forget the falafel. Overlook the granola. Dismiss the dried apricots. Consider the sweet chocolate coating, the crumbly cake, and the delicious cream filling, which will be oh so tasty when you make it yourself. Sweet memories are made of this.
https://tastykitchen.com/recipes/desserts/deliciously-dandy-ding-dongs/
And here is a vegan approach, though you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb: https://thetolerantvegan.com/2011/04/homemade-ding-dongs/
You will of course be doing your baking with this oven – not my middle-of-the-line Kenmore electric range: “THE “ULTIMATE” // La Cornue Château Series: These ranges would be equally at home at Downton Abbey and the world’s greatest restaurants. Grand Palais 180 in stainless steel with polished copper trim, $54,700, Purcell Murray, 800-457-1356”. As seen in Wall Street Journal.
(Here is a very handy dandy column from the New York Times in case you can’t be as devil-may-care about lunches as some of us are: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/dining/no-pbj-allowed-put-dips-into-lunchboxes.html?ref=dining&_r=0 )
“Your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.”
― Dave Barry
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