The Tastemakers

by David Sax

  The main American military base in Afghanistan, ISAF HQ, was nicknamed Camp Cupcake because it was so plush, and cupcakes are regularly sent to troops on the front line. On the Fourth of July, 2011, the American embassy in Kabul served soldiers, Afghan dignitaries, diplomats, and assorted friendly warlords a giant American flag made of cupcakes. A month before, Britain’s MI6 intelligence service had hacked an al-Qaeda online magazine, which features calls for holy war and bomb-making instructions. The British intelligence service then systematically replaced all the jihadist material with step-by-step baking and decorating instructions that they had lifted from an Ohio cupcake shop. They dubbed it Operation Cupcake. Cupcakes can also help international development. Bloom Cakes in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is a not-for-profit organization that teaches Cambodian women the art of baking, employing many in their popular cupcake shop and café that is operated by an Australian mother who moved to Cambodia in 2009 to spread the buttercream gospel.

  I was shocked to find out that Asunción, Paraguay, had not one but two dedicated cupcakeries in addition to a number of individuals who baked cupcakes for events. I have been to Asunción, and it is the last place on earth I expected to find cupcakes. It is a small city ringed by slums—a shantytown actually leans against the walls of the presidential palace—and yet it proved the perfect place for local resident, Giselle Taborda, to open up Dolcito Cupcakes in 2010. “I saw all these little cakes with different colors and decorations on the Internet, and I fell in love with them,” recalled Taborda over e-mail. Initially Dolcito began out of Taborda’s own kitchen, and her first cupcakes were simple, homey creations, more like sugar-dusted muffins and the types of small cupcakes I recall my mother making when I was a kid. As the business evolved, however, Taborda obsessively studied photos of cupcakes online, and today her retail bakery (which opened in 2012) makes some of the most elaborate cupcakes I’ve seen, with everything from three-dimensional Angry Birds characters to an entire sushi menu, with maki rolls and toro belly tuna rendered in intricate layers of icing and fondant.

  As in North America, most of the international cupcake entrepreneurs were younger women who came from business backgrounds, often with no professional baking experience. Basma Azfar, a banker with an MBA in Karachi, Pakistan, began Cupcakes by Cookie in 2008 after making a batch of applesauce-infused Sesame Street cupcakes for her son’s second birthday. “It has blossomed today into something far beyond my expectations,” Azfar told me in an e-mail. “I thought cupcakes to be a fad that shall soon fade, but the trend seems to be now a staple dessert here.” Though Cupcakes by Cookie remained a special order–only business, numerous other retail cupcake bakeries have since opened around Pakistan, such as Sugar and Crumbs in Islamabad and Redolence Bake Studio in Lahore.

  As it did in America, the media played a role in fanning the flames of cupcake fever in every single one of these countries, making the trend as much about culture as taste. “Cupcakes can be found in all the major magazines here in Germany,” said Betsy Eves, the American owner of JavaCupcake, a blog and cupcake recipe site based in Bavaria. “From lifestyle magazines to high-end fashion magazines and food magazines, cupcakes are everywhere.” Her friend Iris Wagner, who owns Mir Wachen Cupcakes in Munich, credits a significant amount of her business to the articles she’s been featured in. The appeal is the cupcake’s novelty. “It’s new,” says Eves. “It’s Western. It’s definitely caught the eye of the twenty-somethings.” In Paris, where the cupcake craze began in 2008 (there’s around a dozen stores now), Cat Bernier, an American who runs Sugar Daze in the 9th Arrondisement, said that initially it was still powered by Sex and the City associations in the press, drawing “young, single French girls who had either seen cupcakes on TV or were reading about ‘la folie de Cupcakes’ in the fashion magazines.” Over time it branched out into a greater French mainstream audience, though one television appearance Bernier did ended with the presenters denouncing this invasion of inferior American desserts, crying, “Vive le patisserie Française!!” on air.

  American cupcake companies are eyeing this global demand as the American market becomes increasingly competitive and, in many cities, oversaturated. At the forefront of this is Magnolia Bakery, which is now headquartered in an office building just off Columbus Circle, across the street from Central Park. The office is built around an open kitchen where new cupcake recipes are being tested, and teams of eager new hires at Magnolia locations around New York (there were five in 2013) are instructed in the art of the perfect frosting swirl, which remains Magnolia’s distinguishing feature along with its pedigree as the trend’s originator. Amazingly, thanks to reruns, two movies, and widespread international syndication, Magnolia’s Sex and the City association still has legs more than a decade after the show went off the air. The company appears in anywhere from one thousand to twelve hundred global media stories annually, and this is only a fraction compared to the volume of requests they receive and turn down.

  Since 2006 Magnolia has been owned and operated by Steve Abrams, a tall, fit, silver-haired former waiter from the Catskills with a passion for fast cars, and his wife, Tyra. A veteran of the restaurant business, Abrams purchased Magnolia from Torey (who moved to the country to raise dairy cows) for $1 million. When I met Abrams in 2012 the company had seven American locations and four in the Middle East. “We get three to five international franchise requests daily,” said Abrams, who opened the Dubai store in 2009 as a lark. “That ratcheted us up just by being in that part of the world.” He saw potential everywhere, from Turkey and Japan, to Rwanda and, yes, even Paraguay. “When I go to Spain I might have sixty stores. Brazil could support twelve to twenty stores. We’re probably looking at three hundred international stores in five years.… As much as America is disliked in many countries, our popular culture is overwhelming, and that’s the culture that most of the world follows. Especially their middle class.”

  Even though the cupcake trend began in rarefied, elite enclaves like the West Village and Beverly Hills, those were just the entry point to the mass market. “Cupcakes are becoming more mainstream,” said an executive at Crumbs who didn’t want to be named, who explained that the company’s expansion plan was to target malls in the heart of America. “Those malls have more fluid shoppers. It definitely caters to a different type. Yes, it could be high end, but it also could be potential for people who want to buy an affordable cupcake who are not affluent, and that’s a huge opportunity. You wouldn’t compromise the quality of the product. We’d maybe change the pricing of it and expect a higher volume.”

  The elephant in the room is that at some point the mania for cupcakes will subside and the market won’t be able to support an increasing number of dedicated cupcakeries. The public’s interest in the trend will move on to donuts, some say, or maybe a pie revival, and many cupcake shops will either close or branch out to serve more products. “I, too, wonder how sustainable it is,” said the Crumbs executive. “Is it a short-lived trend and something you can sustain and build a business out of this? We grapple with that as well. It’s the million-dollar question.” Or, in Crumb’s case, a multimillion-dollar one.

  The media had been calling the end of cupcake fever since the trend began. Joel Stein, writing in Time, called them a “sickness” in 2006, and Vanity Fair, in a 2009 essay on the epidemic of cute in America, likened eating cupcakes to sitting on your couch in a Snuggie while gazing at photos of kittens online (though cupcakes are still served at the Vanity Fair Oscar party). Business writers predicted the cupcake trend would implode as it grew, like Krispy Kreme donuts had a decade earlier. “In America, bubbles form because any good business idea gets funded a dozen times over,” wrote Daniel Gross in Slate back in 2009. “That’s the American way. Cupcakes are now showing every sign of going through the bubble cycle. The first-movers get buzz and revenues, gain critical mass, and start to expand rapidly. This inspires less-well-capitalized second- and third-movers, who believe there’s room enough for them, and encourages esta
blished firms in a related industry to jump in.” The recession would right this, Gross predicted, as people traded down for more affordable options. Others searched for the “next cupcake,” holding up whoopie pies, macarons, and cake pops as the rightful dessert salvation. Instead, the opposite happened. Cupcakes only grew further. The recession swelled the ranks of cupcake bakeries (led by newly unemployed professionals) and eaters. Cake pops and whoopie pies flashed in the pan. Each time someone predicted that cupcakes had jumped the shark, they were forced to eat their words as cupcakes rose to new heights.

  I’m not immune to cupcake fatigue. Where I was once excited about a cupcake shop opening in my neighborhood, I now shake my head and sigh when yet another pops up nearby. Two years ago I moved into a new house, and a few weeks before, the nearest business to us, a hair salon, had transformed into a cupcake bakery called Le Dolci. On our first night in the house a friend brought us a box of their cupcakes in flavors like s’mores and key lime. The icing took up half the weight of the cupcake, and the designs were overly elaborate—one had chocolate cake, embedded chocolate icing, another layer of icing frosting the cake, itself covered in chocolate sauce swirls, topped off with a chunk of brownie as though it was created for some chocolate industry–sponsored bake sale. It wasn’t a cupcake, that delicious, sinful treat of my youth, but rather a Cupcake, the very evocation of this global trend that had turned baked goods into an arms race of cuteness, sacrificing the subtlety of taste for an onslaught of gimmickry and sugar, the boy band of desserts. When I heard a few months later that a cupcake martini bar was opening in Toronto, with sweet alcoholic drinks garnished with your choice of minicupcakes, I prayed for the rapture to arrive and drown this wretched trend in a cleansing lake of fire.

  Perhaps it will come to pass. On April 17, 2013, as I sat in Georgetown Cupcake eating a cherry blossom specimen (vanilla with real cherries, and a glob of cream cheese–cherry icing), having just come from the nearby Sprinkles, where I tried a selection of minis and nearly broke my tooth on their trademarked fondant dots, my brother e-mailed me an article that the Wall Street Journal had just posted, titled, “Forget Gold, the Gourmet Cupcake Market Is Crashing.” Crumbs had posted significant earnings downgrades for fiscal year 2012, and their stock plunged 34 percent in one day, down to $1.70 from a high of $13 a share in 2011. The chain would scale back its aggressive expansion plans, and other cupcake bakeries were quoted as saying that sales were declining. That night in DC I went to my friend Gail’s house for dinner, and her son Zachary, who had just turned six that day, asked to be excused from the table to go play with his new Lego set. “Okay, Zachary, you can still have a cupcake for dessert,” my friend offered, and Zachary, to our collective shock, said he didn’t want one. A six-year-old was tired of cupcakes. Surely this was the cupcake’s death knell.

  Not so, said the cupcakers, including Alison Robicelli, owner of an eponymous bakery known for its cupcakes. In a swift and damning blog post responding to the Crumbs news, she carefully dissected and refuted the cupcake Cassandras’s arguments with in-depth economic and social commentary. “Know why cupcakes aren’t going anywhere?” Robicelli wrote. “Because you need something to be ‘the next cupcake’ just like you need something to be ‘the new black.’ It’s not a bubble; it’s a genre—individually portioned dessert. You can talk about feminism, and Sex and the City, and nostalgia all you want; it comes down to the fact that just about everyone on earth likes cake. Not rocket science.”

  Steve Abrams at Magnolia echoed those sentiments when I’d asked him about the trend’s limits. “You have a food media that’s all fucking pissed off that they haven’t killed the cupcake,” he said. “By the time I bought this business it was no longer a craze in my mind,” said Abrams, noting that Magnolia’s business is evenly split between cupcakes and their other baked goods. “In a hundred years from now there’ll still be a brownie troop that needs a fund-raiser, and they won’t be baking macarons … or fondue.”

  Eventually cupcake fever will break. Some cupcakeries and overextended chains will close or shrink, but their legacy will continue on in commerce and culture. Cupcakes arguably created what has been called the “single-focus premium-indulgence” retail market, a mouthful of industry jargon that basically means small treats people will pay more money for. They have paved the way for every artisanal donut shop, grilled cheese pop-up, and slider miniburger that has come along since the mid-1990s. Starbucks didn’t create the cappuccino and latte, and the chain reached its pinnacle in 2008, before the recession forced them to close thousands of stores. But the trend Starbucks fostered with coffee-drinking behavior, in the way Magnolia did with the cupcake, fundamentally changed the coffee market around the world, creating demand for high-end coffee products in places where low-budget instant coffee once was king. Now you find small independent “third wave” latte art shops around the corner from your home and push-button espresso machines in every single restaurant. Joel Stein, he of the snide cupcake remarks in Time, told me the cupcake has now become the “default American dessert” like pie was a century ago.

  As for the cupcake itself, I believe it will slowly revert to the kid-friendly birthday treat I recall from my youth, which is its logical end. “Cupcakes are cheaper to buy and cheaper to bake,” said my cousin Caroline Davis, whose Toronto bakery, Two Moms, has practically cornered the city’s kosher cupcake market, especially at schools. (Okay, disclosure time: she also made cupcakes for my wedding, and I was delighted to have them.) The cupcake’s advantage remains central to its form: it costs less than regular cake, requires no cutlery to serve or eat, can be customized for groups (a dozen vanilla, a dozen red velvet, two nut-free, two dairy-free, etc.), and they look great. “I like cupcakes,” said Davis, who had recently visited Georgetown Cupcake with her kids on a trip to DC, “but I just don’t understand this craze. I mean, I wouldn’t want to wait in line for one.” The cupcake trend, for all its fireworks and sex appeal, was merely the symptom of the cupcake’s inherent perfection and familiarity, something I knew from the first time I ate one, and this is why it was able to grow so wide and large. But transforming something as familiar and fun as a cupcake into a trend was one thing. What I wanted to find out was how someone could cultivate a food trend from the ground up, starting with an idea, a patch of dirt, and a seed for a food that almost no one had ever tasted.

  Parking is not an easy feat in Charleston’s historic downtown, and no one knows that better than Glenn Roberts, who has a story to tell about each spot he passes. One is in front of a building that belonged to his old friend, now dead, and another spot is in front of one of his first houses here, back when this upscale area was a mixture of eccentric bohemians, conservative members of South Carolina’s grand families, and the African American workers whose culture they all drew from. “Oh hell, let’s just park here and hope the guard is asleep in the booth,” Roberts said, pulling into a private lot. “We aren’t going to be more than an hour anyway.” Roberts peeled his long body out of the car and went around to the trunk.

  Though Roberts is in his mid-sixties, his Dennis the Menace–worthy flop of silver hair, faded jeans, and heavy work boots makes him look like a much younger man. He speaks in a booming voice that quickly fills any space he occupies with a mixture of personal tales (“I once drove mangoes cross-country in a big rig through here!”), arcane local history, and a passionate diatribe for what he loves, which is the traditional food of the Deep South and America. Roberts is a first-rate adventurer and wanderer, the type of all-American man they once sent to space, not because he was a physicist but because he’d jump on a missile and ride that bastard just for the hell of it. He is a Californian with feet in New York and his heart firmly in the South, and in the world of American food he is a legend both for his outsized personality and the fruits of his carefully wrought labor, which I came down to Charleston to experience firsthand.

  Digging around the trunk, Roberts eventually found what he was looking for: a large
Ziploc bag filled with four pounds of ink-black rice. In fact, the rice in Roberts’s hand was IAC600, also known as China Black, a variety he had worked for close to a decade to bring to the culinary market in the United States and was on the brink of releasing for the first time to a select few tastemakers. Ten pounds of this year’s test crop had been set aside to give to the chefs in Robert’s orbit, regular customers of his heritage grains company, Anson Mills. The four pounds in his hand, two-fifths of his entire available yield, were destined to enter the hands of Sean Brock, one of America’s hottest chefs and a leader of South Carolina’s modern low-country cuisine. The China Black rice was so scarce that Roberts valued its worth at $500 a pound, almost half the price of France’s coveted black Périgord truffles, the so-called black diamond of the food world.