Happy 80th birthday, Twinkie!

If you need a good excuse to indulge today (beyond the fact that it’s the weekend), maybe you’ll want to celebrate the 80th birthday of the Twinkie. Hostess’s signature cake was born in Schiller Park, Ill. in 1930, when baker James Dewar was looking for something inexpensive to serve his customers during the Depression. The original dessert was filled with banana cream, but a rationing of bananas during World War II forced him to change the cream filling to vanilla — which remains one of the Twinkie’s key ingredients.

They don’t look a day over 79!