Miss Crankypants seldom goes a full day without finding something about which to gripe. Today it’s the impending national ban on our favorite killer food: Hydrogenated Fats. Apparently, HFs are more deadly than say, tobacco or alcohol, and MUST BE BANNED! Today! Before some nincompoop cook whips up another batch of Twinkies!
And you thought you were slowing down due to age and couch-potato-ism.
Turns out, the stuff that makes the fluff SO good in baked goods is secretly plotting to kill us all. One Twinkie at a time.
Now all you ding-dong lovers, Ho-Ho help-yourselfers and Little Debbie cravers, don’t worry. Your treats are just as bad. It reminds Miss CP of the time a friend gave her a “secret recipe” for homemade filled devil’s food cupcakes.
Miss Cranky was waxing nostalgic for the days of her youth, when she could still eat a package of Sno-Balls and not look like a snowball. Friend offered to share a carefully guarded secret formula for a homemade cupcake that tasted JUST LIKE THE STORE BOUGHT KIND. Minus the little squiggle of white icing on top, but hey. The filling is the part we eat these things for, right? Miss CP was in.
At least she was until she saw the recipe called for a pound of lard. Friend warned her: Don’t try to substitute vegetable shortening for the lard! It won’t work! But an enormous tub of Crisco was the only available stuff on Miss Cranky’s shelf. Anyway, she didn’t even know where to buy any lard. It had been so demonized as “BAD FOR YOU,” all lard had long since been banished to the grocer’s meat department. Miss Cranky was NOT putting meat by-product in her cupcakes! What else could she do? Out came the shortening.
The cupcakes were a total flop, of course. Burned on the bottoms. No matter what the good folks at Crisco try to tell you, when it comes to the secret recipe for filled cupcakes, shortening is doomed.
And now they want to get the HF out of everything anyway.
Miss Crankypants is old enough to know that in a few years, we will either come full circle and lard will suddenly be trendy and good for you again, OR nobody will remember how to chew. We’ll all just have a feeding tube full of those liquid supplements that promise to invigorate some part of your body–they never say what.
Until then, she suggests you hoard shortening the way you hoarded Twinkies a few months back. Also, picket signs and Facebook petitions might get the feds to think again. If not, come on over to Miss Crankypants’ house, where you can  eat all the JUST LIKE STORE BOUGHT goodies. Burned on the bottom.