Organic and Chic's Goldies or The Shiniest Dessert Ever

Upon seeing the below picture in Sarah Magid's Organic and Chic cookbook, I felt instantly bound to the idea of making them. But was I setting myself up for another arts and crafts attempt akin to the Decoupage egg fail?

Maybe so, but these were twice as cute and completely edible. These were "Goldies," organic and chic versions of their inspiration, the Twinkie.

Sarah Magid's version:

our version:

If you like the looks of these guys, you'll want to take a look at the whole book, which reminds me of something Martha Stewart would've produced if she were 30 years younger, more focused on eating organic, and lived in Brooklyn.

Already mentally married to the idea of creating The Goldies, I went on to read the entire recipe and realized that it called for a few items I didn't own.

1. An eclair pan

2. Edible metallic gold dust

3. A pastry bag and tips

Matt and I argued about what to spring for. I thought we could do without the eclair pan and just get eclair paper liners. We called around a few local places and they literally laughed at the idea of not needing the pan. With my feelings newly crushed, I decided to stick to the directions, log on to kitchenclique.com, and buy the pan. Interesting note: While eclair wrappers are everywhere, eclair pans are very very difficult to find. Dessert conspiracy?

For sure, we needed the gold dust. I mean, c'mon. (Per Organic and Chic's recommendation, we got ours via Kitchenkrafts.com.)

But for the pastry bag, I decided we could use a Ziploc bag.

The first step was making the Goldies' bodies a.k.a. Magid's Easiest Chocolate Cake recipe, which did live up to its name--no eggs or milk involved.

After baking for 18 minutes, the bodies were looking gooood.

The vanilla buttercream seemed tricky compared to the other icings I've made in the past. It involved mixing milk, flour and vanilla in a saucepan, stirring until it thickens and then quickly cooling before adding to the creamed butter and sugar mixture. But the result was this super smooth, semi-milky buttercream and my favorite component of the whole dessert.

I guess part of the reason you use a pastry bag is because the alternative looks kinda gross.

Also, without the tip, we would soon realize that we didn't get enough of the good stuff inside the cake.

Even though they looked great.

In her book, Sarah Magid tells the story of how she came up with the idea for Goldies (and other reformed junk food). She tells how, while browsing in a grocery store, her son wanted to buy a box of Twinkies, and after looking at the ingredients on the back of a box she decided that she would bake him her own version minus all the processing and weird bits.

Now, since Magid uses chocolate cake instead of the standard yellow found in the original Twinkie, and then covers that chocolate cake in a layer of chocolate ganache (see below), how is she going to get that yellow Twinkie-like color back in there?

Enter: edible gold dust.

Did we just blow your mind? You're probably asking yourself: What the ef is edible gold dust and/or what is it made of? The website we bought it from simply says it contains no metal. Regardless, it's amazing. Just brush it on and voila, instant Charlie and the Chocolate Factory effect.

I wish the below were a picture of the faces of our pals, Heather and Alex at the moment when we arrived at their house for dinner and pulled the foil off the dessert platter only to reveal more shiny metal. Uhm, gold bricks? Thank you?

Speaking of gold bricks, Matt boxed one up and sent it away to cash4gold.

Just waiting for our check to arrive in the mail!

In short, Goldies are awesome. I mean, at the end of the day it's organic chocolate cake with organic vanilla buttercream filling and a coating of organic dark chocolate ganache. So, yeah... we ate a lot of them this weekend.