For reasons of personal pride, I try to avoid running with the journalistic pack. But there is one recent event with such grave implications that I feel it would constitute professional malpractice if I avoided making comment, and this even though almost everyone else in the media already has done so within the last 48 hours. I'm speaking, of course, about the Hostess brand announcing that it filed for bankruptcy and has baked its last Twinkie and Drake's Coffee Cake after more than 80 years of service to the nation.

Of Hostess, the author writes: 'I can't tell you how important their products became in a crunch. Zuma Press

If all they made were Twinkies, I couldn't care less. I'm sure I'll catch grief, but I've never understood how these atrocities could be considered alluring. I hated them as a kid. And here's why: They lack the key, all-important ingredient that would make them lovable. Chocolate.

With Hostess closing up shop, tributes to the beloved brand's snacks have been popping up all over the web. This is ours.

I probably ought to confess that I'm basically a religious zealot when it comes to chocolate. Anything tastes better dipped in the stuff.

To me, Twinkies always tasted incomplete, like an intermediate stop on the way to a more coherent treat—as if Hostess hadn't received its daily chocolate shipment but decided to go ahead anyway and bake the cakes. Let me put it another way: for people who love Twinkies and are at this moment hoarding the remaining ones (I couldn't find any on my grocer's shelf or I'd have bought a package, and only one package, to confirm they tasted as unappealing as I remember them from my youth), imagine how much better a Twinkie would taste if it were chocolate-coated.

Drake's Yodels Zuma Press

To bolster my contention, I'd like to mention a few other products in the Hostess family that are chocolate-covered and, from my perspective, immensely more appealing. Let's start with Drake's Yodels and Hostess Ho Hos. I wasn't joking when I implied that Hostess filing for bankruptcy rises to the level of a national emergency. If only one of these confections became defunct, I could live with that. But to lose both of them is beyond cruel. What is America supposed to do now to sate its crème-filled chocolate-roll cravings?

By the way, I always thought I could detect a difference between the two. Ho Hos were sweeter; Yodels were more sophisticated, dignified, clubbable. I realize it's all relative: Both pale in comparison to the divine Cadbury Milk Chocolate Mini Roll.

I don't know how readily available the latter are in the U.S. But if you can get your hands on a box, you'll see that all is not lost. The Brits do some things better than we do, and making crème rolls is one of them. The milk chocolate cake tastes moister, the vanilla crème more authentic. And the chocolate coating is the same stuff of which the legendary Cadbury Dairy Milk bar is made.

To me, Twinkies always tasted incomplete, like an intermediate stop on the way to a more coherent treat. Zuma Press

To be honest, I—seemingly like the rest of America—have been cutting back on junk food lately. Which was apparently part of Hostess's problem. But I can't tell you how important their products became in a crunch. If I was on the road, far away from home, and was puzzled what to do about dessert, or a bedtime snack, a package of Yodels or Ho Hos constituted a wholly acceptable answer. It was almost as good as a warm bath and a mother's tender embrace.

I don't consider myself an expert on the entire Hostess product line. I've never had a Devil Dog or a Yankee Doodle—what's the point without chocolate frosting? Or a Funny Bone—peanut butter flavoring in baked goods is a matter of great delicacy, and one I had little confidence a mass-market bakery could pull off.

A word about Ring Dings. I wouldn't say I had a love-hate relationship with them. It was more like healthy suspicion, a sense that you could never be confident they'd deliver happiness. The reason, of course, as any kid can tell you, is that if you bit into the wrong side of the Ring Ding, you might come away with no crème filling whatsoever—because it's all cowering on the other side of the cake.

Ditto Hostess Cupcakes. Its culinary pretension turned on a perfect balance of crème, cake and icing all in the same bite. Cake and frosting alone was a recipe only for disappointment.

On the other hand, Hostess products had the power occasionally to make you take risks, even if you weren't a risk-taker by nature. If you had told me I'd ever enjoy an orange-flavored cupcake, I'd have told you to get lost. But Hostess managed to make its orange cupcakes, with that squiggly white line across the top, more than agreeable.

By the way, I've tried upscale, "homemade" versions of a number of these treats. They just don't cut it. What made Hostess's and other commercial cakes succeed was their nuance, their perfect balance of artificial ingredients.

And can we discuss Hostess Sno Balls? That's another confection that falls into the "who'd-of-thought" category. An iridescent pink hemisphere would normally serve as a flashing warning sign to any serious person. But Hostess had a way of making these marshmallow- and coconut-covered, crème-filled snacks delicious.

One also made a statement by buying them. By standing up to your wife and kids—when they showered you with derision as you made your way to the cash register clutching a package of Sno Balls—you were showing them who was boss, the cardio-vascular consequences be damned.

The one and only Hostess product from whose demise I suspect I'll never recover is the inimitable Drake's Coffee Cake, with its crumbly cinnamon streusel topping. It simply doesn't get better than that. I don't care how many Daniel Bouluds and Jean-Georges Vongerichtens you put in a room, they'll never come up with a better-tasting coffee cake. It flattered your taste buds, patted you on the back for your sense of refinement. May it rest in peace.

I just had another Drake's flashback, and not an entirely pleasant one. Spring of senior year in high school, a bunch of us spent the weekend at a friend's house in the Hamptons. On the way there, I spotted for the first time Drake's oatmeal crème pies—essentially crème filling wedged between two generous, soft oatmeal cookies.

Needless to say, they tasted great. But I remember coming back from the pool one morning to discover that my roommate had polished off the entire box. As it turned out, his actions constituted a declaration of war. Later that summer, after I'd left town, he put the moves on my girlfriend. She turned him down, I believe less out of devotion to me than apparently detecting some deficiency of character. Any man who would steal another's Drakes cakes deserves no compassion.

Corrections & Amplifications
In an earlier version of this article, the first name of Daniel Boulud was incorrectly given as David.