Three Babes Bakeshop

Give the gift of pie! Three Babes Bakeshop is among the many American purveyors selling delicious gifts this holiday season.

Give yummy gifts to the food lovers in your life, with just a couple clicks. All of these delicious products are American-made and available by mail order. You might even want to send yourself some!

Savory
Sommer Hof farms' cheese biscuits
This long-time caterer in upstate New York had to give up her party business just to keep with the demand for her delicious cheddar cheese biscuits. Made with top quality ingredients like Cabot cheddar cheese, sweet cream butter, wheat flour and spices--you can't eat just one! Sommer Hof cheddar cheese biscuit tin, $20.

Olympic provisions
The owner of this Portland, Ore.-based butcher/charcuterie/restaurant grew up with a Greek father who cured his own meat at home. Now he has made a business out of his father's hobby. He starts his salami with a local supply of all-natural, antibiotic-free pork that he and his staff butcher and combine with hand-ground spices. The result is an incredibly smooth and creamy product, with a pungent pork flavor. Sausage sampler of four (including cacciatore, salami nola, sopressata and finocchiona), $40.

Suzy Sirloin's sliders
The Suzy behind Suzy Sirloin is member of the Strassburger family, which has been delivering top quality prime and aged beef to the best steakhouses in the country for five generations. Suzy, realizing that consumers were growing more health-conscious thereby wanting leaner, all-natural meats, started this company to provide superior American farm-raised beef, pork, lamb and veal that have no hormones or antibiotics and are 90 percent lean. A family favorite: the Kids Cuts sliders. Kids Cuts, $99 for 2 packs each of beef, veal, lamb and turkey sliders.

Belle Chevre
This award-winning cremerie in rural Alabama is run by a woman who, years ago, fell in love with chevre. Her small company uses European farmstead techniques so the cheese takes on a mild and unique flavor. Each cheese is hand made, but new to her offerings are cheese-making kits that come with all you need to make your own goat cheese at home. Play date gift box, $50, includes 4 varieties of chevre; DIY cheese kit, $29.95.

Back to the Roots mushroom kit
This company was founded by two UC Berkeley students who got the idea during a class lecture about growing mushrooms on recycled coffee grounds. After experimenting in their fraternity kitchen, they piqued the interested of Whole Foods. Three years later they reuse 3.6 million pounds of coffee grounds from Peet's coffee and they help families grow over 135,000 pounds of fresh food at home. Mushroom kit, $19.95, grows up to 1.5 pounds of oyster mushrooms in as little as 10 days.

Snacks
Krave jerky
Using top quality all-natural ingredients, the jerky comes in a variety of flavors such as basil citrus and lemon garlic turkey, smoky grilled teriyaki beef and pineapple orange beef. It's even 97 percent fat free! Sampler pack, $35 for five bags.

Nothin' But snack bars
Started by a single mother in Westport, Connecticut, Nothin' But premium snack bars are made with organic oats, nuts, seeds, dried fruits, organic cane sugar, olive oil and honey. All bars are created in small batches and shipped within 72 hours of baking. Flavors include chocolate coconut almond, cherry cranberry almond, ginger lemon cashew, and peanut butter banana chocolate. $48 for a dozen.

Sweets
Three Babes Bakeshop pies
Friends since third grade, the two (yes, it's really just two) babes behind this California pie business have been baking together for 15 years. They source most of their ingredients from local farmers and all ingredients are organic. Try their bourbon pecan or honey walnut pies with classic crusts or try their bittersweet chocolate pecan pie with a homemade gluten-free graham cracker crust. Bittersweet chocolate pecan, bourbon pecan, salty honey walnut pies, $35.

Brown Butter Cookie Company
Two sisters started this company four years ago in the small California beach town of Cayucos. Now they have 30 employees who help them brown the butter and hand roll each brown butter sea salt cookie. The cookies are sweet and salty--the sisters' secret version of shortbread. They come in several varieties: original, spice, cocoa, espresso, coconut lime and gluten-free cocoa mint. Brown butter sea salt cookies, $12.95 a dozen.

Perl Girl Baking rugelah
Started by two sisters who grew up in a baking family and have focused their business on the classic Jewish pastries, rugelah, adding their own twist to them. Try their peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and chocolate, or fig and almond varieties, $20 per pound (about 2 dozen).

Notti Toffee
Hand-made in the economically hard hit Alleghany County of North Carolina, this toffee company was started with the intent of creating jobs. The special family recipe was given to the company's owner by her mother-in-law and for 15 years she made the toffee for her friends and family at Christmastime, to which the response was always "This is so good, you should sell it."  When the economy turned in 2009, she decided to go for it and now employs several fellow Appalachian women. Notti toffee pail, from $20.

More from TODAY:

• 5 beers that taste like Christmas
• Perfect pork: Paula Deen makes holiday ham 4 ways
• Hanukkah with a tropical twist: Guava doughnuts and more

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Twinkies have been around since 1930, but today their manufacturer has filed for bankruptcy protection.

Hostess Brands, the maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, has filed for bankruptcy protection, but it’s unlikely Twinkies will disappear. After all, the crème-filled snack cake has been around for more than 80 years. There was a time when no self-respecting American mom would dream of sending her children off to school without a Twinkie in their lunchboxes.

Still, things have surely changed since I went to work for Continental Baking Company (which today has morphed into Hostess Brands). In those days the company, which also made Wonder Bread and other Hostess snacks, was part of the mighty conglomerate ITT, reporting directly to its CEO.  It operated 66 bakeries throughout the U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii. Twinkies were as well-known a national brand as Ford or Coke, and there were more Wonder Bread and Twinkie trucks on the road than there were brown UPS trucks. All over America, schoolchildren visited Twinkie bakeries with their teachers and stared in awe as those yellow cakes shot down conveyers like machine-gun bullets.

Those were heady days for Continental, and Twinkies were its star performer. I had a Twinkie-yellow Cadillac convertible and a Twinkie-yellow ski boat, both with white tops. I loved Twinkies. Everybody did. How could this wonderfully tasty American icon fall so far? I think the quality has diminished since my day.

With dozens of bakeries scattered across the country, quality control was crucial: Every Twinkie had to look and taste exactly like every other Twinkie produced in every other Hostess bakery. To achieve that, every day each bakery manager and his team (along with any executives visiting from corporate headquarters, like me) would examine and taste-test every product, down to counting the number of cherries in each Hostess cherry pie.

Hostess was a success back then because its quality control was superb. Every product had a very short shelf life: just two or three days. Whatever didn’t sell by then was removed from shelves and returned to its bakery, where it was sold from the bakery’s thrift stores (the part of the business I was most involved with) at a reduced price. Thrift-store sales were huge, and if there weren’t enough returns to meet demand, we filled the gap with fresh product; we didn’t want customers traveling to the store to find empty shelves.

By the time Continental Baking was acquired by Interstate Bakeries Corporation (today Hostess Brands) in 1995, I had changed jobs, but I watched with interest as shelf lives were extended with preservatives and formulas were changed – even the formula for Twinkies, which had been sacrosanct in my day.

And Twinkies have changed from when I used to taste-test them, no question about that. The soft, creamy filling of yore is neither as soft or as creamy as it was then. The yellow sponge cake comes close, but it's not as fresh-tasting. And that is no surprise, because today's Twinkies have a 14-day shelf life, so of course there is a lot more preservative in each Twinkie.

The treat beloved by baby boomers has changed to something not as good. And that may have much to do with Hostess’s current financial woes.

Dick Schindler is a retired supermarket executive who tasted a lot of Twinkies during his time at Continental Baking. His son Rick is a TODAY.com writer/editor.

More on Twinkies:

• Twinkie sushi? Try these little cake concoctions 
• Gulp! Take a gander at a Twinkie’s 37 or so ingredients
• Turn Twinkies, Ho Hos, Cheez Doodles into ‘gourmet’ treats
• Make your own Twinkies with this recipe

Chuck Burton / AP

It's National Doughnut Day, and to help you get in the spirit, Dunkin' Donuts and Krispy Kreme are offering free doughnuts. At Krispy, all you need is to bring your hungry self in for for one free doughnut, and no purchase is neccessary. At Dunkin', you'll need to buy a coffee to get your sweet iced dough. Some are saying that not all Dunkin Donuts shops are participating, so be sure to find out what the deal is at the counter.

Hope this will make your Friday a little sweeter! Tell us, what's your favorite kind of doughnut?

Nabisco

The new Triple Double Oreo will hit store shelves this summer.

 
First, there was the Oreo, a humble cookie developed in 1912 by the National Biscuit Company, now known simply as Nabisco. Then came the variations: the Double Stuf, the chocolate-coated Fudge Cremes, the Mini Oreo. Now, Nabisco has confirmed to TODAY.com perhaps the most indulgent Oreo in existence — the Triple Double Oreo.

Mere rumors of the cookie innovation got the Internet buzzing. FoodBeast first broke the story with photos of the new product’s packaging from someone who supposedly does “pre-release product testing for Nabisco.” The Oreo prototype consists of not one, not two, but three layers of cookie, with one layer of the Oreo’s classic white creme filling and another made of chocolate creme.

The original leak came from Reddit user Palooz, followed by a few tweets that all claimed to have photos of the cookie. Speculation over the authenticity of the new Oreo was rampant until Basil T. Maglari, associate director of corporate affairs for Nabisco, told Today.com, “Yes, the rumors are true.”

Nabisco’s official statement: “This summer, Oreo will introduce a new 'twist' on the iconic cookie: the Triple Double Oreo. Three chocolate Oreo wafers with two layers of creme -- one classic vanilla, and one chocolate. While we tried our best to safeguard this news, we couldn't hold back the buzz.”

So there you have it. This summer, Oreo lovers will finally have something that makes the Double Stuf look healthy in comparison. Still, no matter how indulgent the prospect of three Oreo wafers stuck together with two different kinds of creme is, nothing will ever replace our county fair-style favorite: the deep-fried Oreo. That is, of course, until someone deep-fries the Triple Double.