You know that moment, when you’re doing something completely routine and everydayish, when suddenly the light bulb goes off?

Maybe you suddenly remembered where you hid your spare set of keys for “safe-keeping” or in a moment of total spontaneity, decided which pizza place to pick up dinner from.

Or maybe you’re on the subway, stuck in the midst of another interminable delay (I’m looking at you, TTC), and you’re hit with a moment of inspiration so great you want to jump for joy except for the fact you are wedged in so tightly it would take a shoe horn to get you out.

Maybe, in that moment of clarity, you realize that yes … yes … you should make that Twinkie Bundt Cake and you should add in some freshly picked strawberries because that would be amazeballs.

Yeah.

I had Twinkie Bundt Cake on the bake for quite some time, ever since I purchased Shauna Sever‘s Pure Vanilla: Irresistible Recipes and Essential Techniques. A lovely book dedicated the joys of vanilla (there are many), the book got a bit lost in the pile of cookbooks that I’d been hoping to try out.

But hark! I happened to come across the recipe for Sever’s Twinkie Bundt Cake (from her book) on Leite’s Culinaria.

So there I was, not too long after, languishing during a particularly torturous subway ride when I found myself longing for the end of winter and the first thing my frozen brain latched on to was freshly picked strawberries.

And the next thing you know I’m thinking of this sweet little cake that’s a riff on those popular little snack cakes (that we were never allowed to have as children) and I thought, “Hey. I’m an adult. I can eat Twinkies if I want to. I can bake a Twinkie Bundt Cake if I want to. I can add strawberries to the filling if I want to.”

And thus was born the slightly adapted Twinkie Bundt Cake (with a strawberry marshmallow cream filling).

So why is it called the “Three Times a Charm Cake”? Because it took me three times before I got the strawberry filling just right.

Also. It’s delicious. And I wanted to make it three times. Maybe I ate it all myself one-and-a-half of those times.

Don’t judge me.