I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, Little Debbie NEVER came to our pantry. I’m not sure why, really. My mom wasn’t a health food nut or anything. Oreos, Ding-Dongs, and Chips Ahoy regularly found their way to our kitchen. But Little Debbie was not invited. Nope. Not at our house. When I got older and drove my own grocery cart, I eventually discovered Little Debbie and her collection of artificially flavored, chemical infused, individually wrapped snacks, and I loved them. Well, I loved the Oatmeal Cream Cakes, anyway. I don’t have much recollection of any of the others. I didn’t buy them for my own kids, of course, but I did harbor my own secret knowledge that these little cream-filled oatmeal cookies were sinfully good. And then I tried to forget about them.
Fast forward to one day last spring. I was in Paris, reading the day’s installment of Pioneer Woman, and what do you think she dangled in front of me, on my over-sized Mac screen? Yep- homemade Oatmeal Cream Cakes, said to taste just like Little Debbie’s. At that moment I knew I had to try them. I begged Mlle. Cordon-Bleu to make me some, but she never got around to it (humph). I never really stopped thinking about them, though, and when my sweet sister and my three niecelets came to spend a few nights with me here in Houston, it seemed like the perfect excuse to attempt to re-create the sweet snack I remembered.
The recipe is here, on Pioneer Woman’s site. You probably recall that she and I used to be BFF’s. * But her blog went viral after I began reading it, and then she started publishing cookbooks, and then Food Network discovered her, and now she is All That, and we aren’t as close. But I still regularly bookmark her recipes, because I’m not the jealous type, and because sometimes I need to throw all sanity to the wind and make something guaranteed to shorten my life by at least a few minutes.
Like these.
My sister and I baked the cookies and made the frosting and then let the girls construct a few. We went with the cooked icing over the marshmallow cream version. It just seemed right. And it was.
A little precautionary parchment paper!
Look what I made, Aunt Kate!
Just her size!
My sistah liked them, too!
Nothing like being back home with family. And Little Debbie.
Let me know if you attempt these high-brow concoctions at your house. But if you do, keep in mind my sister’s warning that eating two will give you a stomach ache. I wonder how she knew that? I didn’t tell her. Eating two didn’t bother my stomach a whit.
*Well, in MY mind we were BFF’s. I worshipped her from afar and then was able to meet her (twice) when she came to Blue Willow Bookshop (where I worked) on her book tours. I think that pretty much makes us BFF’s, don’t you?
Mais Oui Paris 