An American snack cake that is owned by Hostess Brands and marketed as a "Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling".

Twinkies were invented in Schiller Park, Illinois in 1930 by James Alexander Dewar, a baker for the Continental Baking Company. realising that several machines used to make cream-filled strawberry shortcake sat idle when strawberries were out of season, Dewar conceived a snack cake filled with banana cream, which he dubbed the Twinkie. He said he came up with the name when he saw a billboard in St. Louis for "Twinkle Toe Shoes". During World War II, bananas were rationed and the company was forced to switch to vanilla cream. This change proved popular, and banana-cream Twinkies were not widely re-introduced. The original flavour was occasionally found in limited-time promotions, but the company used vanilla cream for most Twinkies. In 1988, Fruit and Cream Twinkies were introduced with a strawberry filling swirled into the cream. However, the product was soon dropped. Vanilla's dominance over banana flavouring would be challenged in 2005, following a month-long promotion of the movie King Kong. Hostess saw its Twinkie sales rise 20 percent during the promotion, and in 2007 permanently restored the banana-cream Twinkie to its snack lineup.

A single Twinkie contains 2.5 grammes of saturated fat, representing 13% of the recommended daily intake of saturated fat based on a 2,000 calorie diet. It is 42% sugars, 21% complex carbohydrates and 11% fat by weight.

A common urban legend claims that Twinkies have an infinite shelf life or can last unspoiled for a relatively long time of ten, fifty, or one hundred years due to chemicals used in production. This urban legend is false, although Twinkies can last a relatively long time (25 days or more) because they are made without unstabilized dairy products and thus spoil more slowly than most bakery items. In reality, Twinkies are on the shelf for a short time; a company executive told the New York Times in 2000 that the "Twinkie is on the shelf no more than 7 to 10 days."

In the 2012 film Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, the character Blackout has the power to decay anything he touches. When going through a lunch he causes a sandwich and an apple to decay in seconds, then is impressed when he is unable to cause a Twinkie inside the lunch to decay.

In the 2008 film WALL-E, a Twinkie is sighted completely undecayed in its wrapper on WALL-E's truck 700 years after the Earth was rendered largely uninhabitable for organic life forms.

The plot of Family Guy's second season episode entitled "Da Boom" has the gryphon family walking to a Twinkie factory in Natick, Massachusetts and creating a new civilization there after society is decimated by a nuclear bomb from the Y2K bug; the joke being Twinkies will be the only food left after a nuclear holocaust.

Conversely, the 2009 film, Zombieland depicts one of the main characters on quest to locate Twinkies, asserting that they do have an expiration date. The 1988 film, Die Hard has John McClane almost becoming sick after eating a "thousand year old Twinkie" found in an under-construction floor of the Nakatomi Plaza building.