My cooking adventure does not begin with flour-dusted memories in the making with my children at my side. Another feature of my generation is our eat-as-I-say-not-as-I-did proclivities, so my children had never even heard of a Twinkie. Further, having a mom who bakes all the time, they saw no novelty in this project, preferring to instead repair to an episode of “House of Anubis.”

I would thus need taste testers, and turned to two colleagues: Carl H. and Eric S., whose identities I am protecting because Carl eats much like a teenager and Eric is a national security reporter of great journalistic seriousness but whimsical snack-food tastes. (Here is what I hear when I eavesdrop on Eric’s phone conversations: “So, are those lethal or nonlethal?” Here is what he hears listening to me: “Is that a buttercream or really more of a ganache?”)

What we had here was a traditional sponge cake-style recipe, with whipped egg whites and sugar forming the base, then filled with seven-minute frosting, the marshmallow-y spread favored in many cake recipes.

The thrill of the perfectly shaped cake emerging from the pan was doubled with the infusing process. I poked my little infusing gun into the bottom of the cake three times, and then injected them with cream until the cake sort of swelled slightly in my hand. (Once that swelling starts, you’ve injected enough.)

I ran my project over to the neighbors, where we all squealed with delight at the familiar ooze of cream and that softly yielding vanilla cake.

Delicious! Delightful! To bed! The next morning at work, the thrill was slightly gone when Eric and Carl proclaimed them delicious, but noted that the cream had been absorbed by the cake. “You seem to have had trouble maintaining the integrity of the cream cavity,” Eric said.

Stella Parks, pastry chef at Table 310 in Lexington, Ky., who often posts recipes for childhood treats on her blog BraveTart.com, explained the science. “The seven minute in seven-minute frosting might as well refer to its shelf life rather than prep time,” she said. “It’s just a collection of air bubbles trapped in a net of egg whites and sugar. Within a few hours of preparation the bubbles start to collapse and the egg whites begin to revert to a liquid state, facilitating the frosting’s absorption into the cake.”