Pastry Snacks

In the realm of snacks, pastries carve out a unique niche between small candies and chocolate.  They’re sweet, but they’re also based on some form of pastry dough.  One of the big complaints about sweet snacks is that they just don’t go down well with drinks.  Pastries meet that need by providing a relatively dry base that’s usually filled with something sweet and tasty.

A pastry can range between overly simplistic to elegantly deluxe.  On the cheap end of things, the most basic pastry snack is the Twinkie.  Twinkies have been a favorite of kids, police officers, construction workers, and anyone else who wants something sweet, simple, and portable.  A Twinkie is basically an excuse to eat a lot of sweet cream filling.  It’s just a small baton-shaped pastry that uses a very soft sponge cake injected with wonderfully rich white filling.

Moving up the scale, there’s the Hostess chocolate cupcake.  You’ve probably seen it (and eaten it) before.  It’s basically a small chocolate cupcake with a cream filling, and it’s topped with a layer of chocolate icing and that famous white icing ’swirl’ pattern across the top.

Most pastries are a bit spongy, allowing for great dipping potential with milk.  They’re not typically as potently sweet as chocolate, so they’re also a great alternative if you’re not that crazy about sugar.

The problems with pastry-style snacks are numerous.  First of all, they’re messy.  If you’ve ever tried to eat one you probably ended up getting your hands dirty.  Second, they’re loaded with preservatives.  Snacks need a strong shelf life, and unfortunately this means that industrial pastries taste a bit off compared to something you could buy fresh from the bakery.  Lastly, there’s all that cream.  Pastry snacks are the sort of thing that can lead to obesity if left unchecked.

Pastry snacks will never replace chocolate bars or even candies as America’s favorite snack food.  However, they fill an important need for cake-like snacks that can last a long time on the shelf.  It’s unlikely that industrial cake manufacturers will ever completely disappear, though there seems to be a gloomy horizon.

Recently, the manufacturer of Twinkies filed for bankruptcy.  They cited mounting health concerns and rising costs as the main reasons.  With the health craze in full force, and many carb-conscious diets taking over, the demand for pastry snacks is likely to dip in the following years.