by David Sax
Cupcakes were an intensely media-driven trend from the get-go primarily because they took off in New York City. The New York media world is an echo chamber, and the city is filled with thousands of journalists and media personalities from all over the world who tend to report the same cultural stories in their backyard, which is why trends tend to start there and not, say, in Wichita. The cupcake’s coverage began in the local press, with small articles mentioning Magnolia’s popularity. Other local writers and publications picked up on that and wrote their own versions of the story, and these were seen by editors and writers at national publications who, in turn, put their own spin on it, setting in motion an unstoppable spin cycle of publicity.
Stories about cupcakes were nothing new for the food media, but these were different. Fashion magazines became a particularly strong advocate of cupcakes, usually featuring them in short “what’s hot” stories because many fashion editors and writers lived in the same neighborhoods as Magnolia and Buttercup and watched Sex and the City. “I remember the cupcake spreads from my mom’s McCall’s back in the 1970s,” recalled James Oseland, editor-in-chief of Saveur magazine and a food journalist since the early 1990s. “When I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, every other food story in ladies’ magazines or food spreads in the newspaper was a cupcake story.” But as the trend grew in New York, Oseland began noticing all the other food publications coming up with their own versions of cupcake spreads because of what Oseland called their “collective narcolepsy.” “It’s an easy sell and an easy story to do,” said Oseland. “It’s an evergreen that can be dropped in wherever and whenever. It’s not seasonally specific, and it’s a crowd-pleaser among people who take in certain types of food media. You can make the cupcake story look very differently. You can do the Barbie fantasy palace version, or you can do your Luddite version of the cupcake, and you can tell the story visually and appeal to your readers. You can make these beautiful, gorgeous, appealing, very makeable-looking foods and splatter your pages with them, and you can resuscitate that often.”
In the hands of the media cupcakes became the perfect chameleon: a shape-shifting combination of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter that could be grafted onto any storyline. What other food could run the gamut from cheap and cheerful to decadent and deluxe with a twist of the frosting or a sprinkle or two? What other baked good could be in a women’s fashion magazine, symbolizing sexy single indulgence, right next to a parenting magazine in the newsstand, in which it was a smiling birthday party treat, without any sort of conflict?
No one understood the cupcake’s versatility better than Karen Tack, a food stylist in Connecticut who had been elaborately decorating cupcakes for magazines like Good Housekeeping, Women’s Circle, Family Fun, and other supermarket checkout titles since 1990. “I really think magazines drove the demand for cupcakes,” she said, reflecting on the trend’s increasing media presence in the late 1990s. “I mean, people were making cupcakes all the time, but it was just a realization that here’s this thing we can do anything with. A blank slate, an untouched gem where people previously thought you could only do in vanilla and chocolate.” In 1998 Tack and her photographer partner, Alan Richardson, styled and shot the photographs for the Magnolia bakery’s first cookbook. The Magnolia cupcake was unlike any she’d seen before. It was topped with a confectioner’s sugar–based icing, spread with a very specific swirling technique that left a sort of crater in the center that ended in a miniature peak. It was half cake and half frosting. “They had to close the shop for a couple of hours while shooting,” recalled Tack. “You’d think we’d done something terribly wrong. People were throwing themselves on the sidewalk because they couldn’t get their daily cupcake. ‘Oh my god!’ They’d scream, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
As the cupcake trend picked up steam Tack and Richardson were increasingly busy with cupcake assignments from magazines, and each time they upped the ante, decorating the cakes as increasingly elaborate animals, cartoon characters, and figures. In 2008 they published Hello Cupcake, a cookbook filled with their decorations. They hoped it would sell two thousand copies. Instead, it went on to sell hundreds of thousands, spawning sequels, multiple appearances on the Today show and Martha Stewart Living, and innumerable copycat titles of a genre known affectionately as cupcake porn. Each article, TV segment, or book about cupcakes generated more of the same. The cupcake media trend fed on itself.
“The food media as a whole is generally lazy,” remarked Joshua Ozersky, a food writer for Esquire and others and who is no fan of cupcakes. “There’s very few people in the food media that really have their own tastes and trust their own tastes. Generally most of them are followers. That’s why the food industry is dominated by trends. If you call something a trend, especially if you’re an editor, then it artificially becomes that.… There’s a group-think aspect. No one wants to be left out of the cupcake sweepstakes. It’s a zeitgeist with frosting on top.”
In terms of timing, cupcakes emerged onto the national scene just as the food media began its transformation from a cottage industry, largely aimed at women and an elite of gourmets, into a global, digital, omnivorous titan. Cupcake mania began just a few years after the Food Network first aired and North Americans began treating cooking as entertainment. The cable modem, which brought broadband Internet into homes across the world, was released onto the market in 1997, the year Magnolia’s cupcake lines started forming. Its usage spiked in 2001, when the cupcake trend began picking up steam and coinciding with the rise of websites devoted to foods and a growing cadre of new blogs dedicated to cupcakes. Through these technologies and new media outlets, cupcakes became the most widely covered, rapidly disseminated, endlessly debated, and chronicled food trend of all time. One of the first and still most prominent cupcake bloggers is Rachel Kramer Bussel, a New York–based writer who is also well known as a writer of bondage erotica. I first met Bussel in 2006 at a sex-themed storytelling night in a former New York massage parlor that she helped organize. She passed around trays of cupcakes, and later in the evening guests were free to flog her with a leather riding crop. Bussel had launched her blog, Cupcake Takes the Cake in late 2004, chronicling the emerging field of cupcake shops around Manhattan and, later, the United States with her coblogger, Nichelle Stephens.
In 2012 I met Bussel again at Sweet Revenge, a cupcakery a few blocks from Magnolia that opened in 2008 and distinguished itself by pairing its extensive menu of freshly baked cupcakes with fine wines and other alcoholic drinks. Behind us four Dutch tourists sampled a quartet of cupcakes with a bottle of Prosecco at a wooden bistro table with worn chairs under a globe lamp as Edith Piaf played overhead. Here was just one slice of the cupcake craze among hundreds: its boozy Parisian Belle Époque evocation, scented not with talk of radical politics and tobacco but of browning butter and caramelizing sugar. Bussel ordered the day’s special, the Very Strawberry cupcake, a Mexican vanilla bean cake stuffed with macerated strawberries and topped with strawberry cream cheese frosting. She removed a camera flash from her overstuffed handbag and lit up the cupcake, taking photos at various angles with her phone to upload to her blog.
The cupcake blogs lifted the cupcake out of New York and allowed them to proliferate anywhere there was an Internet connection. Cupcake fanatics would read Cupcake Takes the Cake and send Bussel their own photos and stories, either of cupcakes they made at home or of cupcakeries that were opening in their respective cities. In turn, the blog and all the accompanying press inspired numerous cupcake entrepreneurs to enter the business. “People saw the stories we wrote, and they thought, ‘Hey, I can do that,’ ” said Bussel, who consumed her cupcake as though performing its autopsy: she laid it on its side, mashed it down with her fork, and ate the icing and cake separately, allowing her to taste their distinctive components. (To me it tasted like a denser version of strawberry shortcake, with a tart edge to it.)
Bussel believed the cupcake’s unique advantage was that it started to really take off natio
nally around 2006 to 2008, shortly after the launch of Facebook and Twitter, both of which helped elevate the cupcake as the world’s first viral food trend. “Suddenly,” says Bussel, “bakers could reach customers directly. They could experiment with the persona of the business and test what they were selling in terms of its image.” She also pointed out that one of the first popular videos on YouTube was a Saturday Night Live music video called, “Lazy Sunday,” in which a rapping Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg “hit up Magnolia and mack on some cupcakes.”
Then, in the fall of 2008, the Great Recession hit America, and cupcakes reached a fever pitch. Suddenly you had a tremendous sense of insecurity, which was perfect for a renewed interest in American comfort food (similar to the one that had lifted Magnolia after 9/11). You also had thousands of young professionals who either lost their corporate jobs or became disenchanted with them. Sitting up late at night, fine tuning their résumés, more than a few flipped back and forth to cupcake blogs and articles on cupcakes, read about the financial success of some of these bakeries, and thought, Hey, I could do that. As a result, cupcakes became big business. They were cheap to make, the profit margins were very high, and customers tended to be loyal and buy multiples. Adam Sternbergh, writing in New York magazine at the time, likened them to the bakery equivalent of crack cocaine: They were addictive, and the high demand caused turf wars to spring up between cupcake dealers. As former investment bankers and lawyers around North America entered the business and began to set up local chains and franchises with an eye on global domination, the lawsuits started to fly. Buttercup launched a lawsuit against Little Cupcake, founded by former employees, for apparently pilfering the feel of Appel’s bakery. Sprinkles, a Beverly Hills–based cupcake chain founded in 2005 by Candace and Charles Nelson (the first cupcakery to bake cupcakes exclusively), ruthlessly pursued any other cupcake bakery they felt impinged on their brand, using multiple lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters to prevent other shops from using the word “sprinkles,” their store’s pink color, or their trademarked use of a fondant dot within a dot atop their cupcake’s icing.
The largest chain to come out of the cupcake wars was Crumbs Bake Shop, which first opened in New York City’s Upper West Side in 2003 by Jason Bauer and his wife, Mia. Crumbs expanded quickly, first in the New York area and then to other cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, totaling more than sixty stores in 2013. The company sells over fifty different varieties of cupcakes, including miniature cupcakes and gigantic cupcakes (basically a tall regular cake), in flavors like cannoli (topped with a cannoli), brewski (topped with a beer stein cookie), and the pigskin (topped with a candy football on green-icing turf). Crumbs cupcakes are baked and iced in four large central kitchens (each employing around five bakers and twenty decorators) around the clock, and they are delivered each day to stores in that region. In 2011 Crumbs set a precedent by taking the company public on the NASDAQ exchange with a $58.9 million market valuation based on monthly sales of over $1.5 million, with cupcakes selling at $3.75 apiece. Cupcake speculators didn’t even have to get their hands dirty with flour and butter anymore; they could call up their broker and buy as many shares of the cupcake trend as they could afford.
The economic impact of the cupcake trend is difficult to quantify because cupcakes aren’t tracked like a commodity such as oil or corn, and aside from Crumbs, all other cupcake businesses are privately held. According to articles in the industry trade journal Modern Baking, which tracks the bakery industry nationally, cupcake sales grew 56 percent from 2008 to 2012, a period when they continually gained market share against regular cakes. “We’ve seen an explosion of a new market segment called cupcakeries, popping up around the country,” said Heather Sisson, director of sales and marketing at Lucks Food Decorating Company, one of the largest and oldest bakery supply companies in America. The wholesale market for cupcake-specific decorations more than doubled in the past decade, drawing in a whole new group of suppliers (of everything from branded cupcake tins to transport trays) and making cupcakes Lucks’s number-one product category. Where the previous cupcake market was focused on mom-and-pop bakeries and packaged supermarket cupcakes that cost a dollar per dozen, the rise of the cupcakeries changed the cake business fundamentally.
“More [cupcakeries] began popping up in every state,” said Sisson, “and that of course caused the independent bakeries to change cupcake programs, and then in-store bakeries jumped on the bandwagon. We then jumped all over the cupcake craze.” Cupcakes are now at the point of the trend’s economic evolution at which they are moving into the mass market. “We meet with Walmart and talk to them about cupcakes being an important part of their bakery program,” Sisson said, estimating that there are already around eight to nine thousand independent cupcake bakeries in America alone. They are in big cities and small towns, red states and blue states, from I Love Cupcakes in Key Largo, Florida, to Kastle’s Kreations, a cupcake truck in Eagle River, Alaska, and everywhere in between. Even if each bakery doesn’t pull in the millions that a Sprinkles or Magnolia does, it’s safe to say that the annual cupcake GDP in America is in the multibillion-dollar range.
The cupcake trend has also spawned a cottage industry of accessories and affiliated products that has generated untold millions more. Johnny’s Cupcakes sells hip clothes with a cupcake-and-cross-bones pirate logo out of stores designed around a bakery look. On the weekend you can enjoy your red velvet cupcakes with a chilled bottle of Riesling from California’s Cupcake Vineyards (one review calls it “overpoweringly sweet, creamy, with a touch of acidity on the finish”) or a cocktail with the company’s brand of vodka, which comes in flavors such as Chiffon, Frosting, and Devil’s Food. Houseware companies, from Sunbeam to Babycakes, sell electric cupcake-baking machines and decorating stations, including one shaped like Hello Kitty (presumably for the enthusiastic Asian market). There are cupcake-themed novels and children’s toys, cupcake jewelry sold online, plastic cupcakes used to sell women’s shoes (not to mention high heel–shaped cupcakes), and even a Sprinkles cupcake ATM machine in Los Angeles that takes cash or credit cards and in return dispenses cupcakes twenty-four hours a day.
The most significant cultural offshoot of the trend is television, which not only rakes in big money from advertising and syndication but also fuels cupcake growth even further by inspiring a wider audience to bake, buy, and sell cupcakes. The summer of 2010 saw the launch of the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars, a fast-paced baking competition show that pitted teams of cupcake chefs against each other. Similar to Bravo’s Top Chef or pretty much any other reality cooking show, Cupcake Wars features lots of running around, highly edited moments of “tension,” and catty judging from the likes of Sprinkles’s Candace Nelson. A month after Cupcake Wars had its debut TLC premiered DC Cupcake, a show focused on the daily life of Washington’s famed cupcakery Georgetown Cupcake, owned by sisters Sophie LaMontagne and Katherine Kallinis, who constantly struggle in each episode to get orders out the door just in time. The series premier of DC Cupcake drew over a million viewers, and many more watch each week as well as in reruns. The two times I visited Georgetown Cupcake the lineup (mostly tourists, though some locals) snaked up the block, even on a scorching summer day. Every person who walked in made sure to photograph their order, the surroundings, the cupcake they bought, and the act of eating that cupcake, photos that they instantly uploaded to social media, doing their part to keep spreading the trend around the world.
In November 2011 I was walking on a crowded street in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a man in front of me was talking on his cell phone:
“Yeah yeah, it was a fun party … yeah good wine, pretty girls, too.…
The food? They had a big sushi bar, lots of sushi, and then all sorts of cupcakes.…
Yes, cupcakes.…
It’s like a small cake. Like a sweet muffin. It’s like a sweet muffin cake or some bullshit, I don’t know. People were going crazy for them.…
Yeah
… CUP CAKE … like a cake in a cup. Who knows … it must be an American thing.”
I had lived in Buenos Aires from 2003 to 2005, and never once during that time had I heard about or set eyes on a cupcake, even for the birthdays of my expat American friends. Argentines love their sweets, especially anything filled or smeared with dulce de leche, and they tend to be pretty inflexible in their food choices. But in the years that I’d been gone not only had the cupcake arrived in Argentina; it had begun its spread around the party scene, pairing with sushi (a trend that was in full bloom when I lived there) to attain the same iconic status with upper-class tastemakers as it had in New York more than a decade before. At least half a dozen cupcakeries have since opened in Buenos Aires, each with its own highly stylized décor, website, and interior. Local and international media coverage on them inevitably makes reference to Sex and the City and Magnolia. Muma’s Cupcakes, one of the most popular shops, with four locations (including one in Uruguay), has the song “Seasons of Love” from the Rent soundtrack playing on their website in an infinite loop, driving the bohemian spirit of the West Village into your brain like a frilly pink hammer.
Not even two decades into its rise, the humble cupcake has become a power instrument of globalization, spreading good old-fashioned American culture throughout the world. Spin a globe, put your finger down, and it’s pretty much certain that cupcakes have begun appearing in whatever country you are pointing at. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, Cherry Blossom Cupcakes splits the market with Silver Lining Cupcakes, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, owner Kelsey Malaika McKinney claims her Dots Cupcakery is the “sassiest cupcake shop in all of East Africa,” something that Nairobi, Kenya’s Just Cupcakes might dispute. The world’s most expensive cupcake is, naturally, found in Dubai, going on sale in 2012 under the moniker the Golden Phoenix. For around $1,000 the discerning (or at least very wealthy) cupcake eater gets a cupcake with imported organic flour and butter, premium Italian cocoa, Ugandan vanilla beans, and the obligatory edible gold 23-karat sheet, all presented on a gold stand with a golden spoon, and strawberries dipped in edible gold. Home Made Cake sells cupcakes (as well as cakes) in Baghdad, Iraq, and although there isn’t a dedicated cupcakery yet in Kabul, Afghanistan, Christian American missionaries have reportedly been working there in recent years, teaching Afghan women to bake cupcakes so they can cater to Western aid workers and embassies.