Rise of the Cupcakes

Sex and the City sparked another trend when Carrie scoffed them at New York’s famous Magnolia bakery. Jessica Simpson vomited them up on Newlyweds. This year MAC released Sugarsweet, a cupcake-themed make up range. Cupcakes are invading every aspect of popular culture.

Increasingly an acceptable and common gift in lieu of wine and chocolates, these little bundles of frosted joy are increasingly showing their faces at christenings, hen parties, weddings and baby showers.

Keen to cash in on Google’s most-searched recipe, Irish bakers have been experimenting to find the perfect formula and new businesses are springing up to feed the growing demand. Sweet Cupcakes in Dún Laoghaire is one new venture set up by husband-and-wife team, Paddy and Mel.

The duo say, “The cupcake appeals on a number of levels - the look, the taste and the size. It’s not the same as having a slice of cake. We see people walking along and when they see us, their eyes light up.”

Sweet Cupcakes sell at the Bloomfield shopping centre every Saturday, “We bring four large boxes of cupcakes and normally sell out in between three or four hours, earlier sometimes. We did a school fair and we were the only stand who sold out, again long before closing time.”

Paddy and Mel started their cottage business from Blackrock market just before Christmas 2008, and business has been booming since. In the same month, Lolly and Cooks, formerly LaraLu Foods in Georges St arcade began selling cupcakes too.

Owner Laragh Strahan says, “I’m unsure if it’s just a fad. Maybe in a few months, we’ll be moving on to something else. But for the moment, our cupcake trade is doing really well.”

Although a rainbow of colours smile up at you from the counter, Laragh says, “The icing is probably the most noticeable thing about them, but every filling is different too. The cake base itself can be customised. Cupcakes are very versatile.”

Purely for research purposes, we tried Lolly and Cook’s most popular cupcake; the Coconut and Raspberry Goblin Bliss (€2.30). With a raspberry filling and soft sponge topped with fresh buttercream, shavings of fresh coconut and a plum raspberry on top; it was pure bliss at first, but also sickeningly sweet.

The company do special commissions as well as trading from the stall. “We’ve provided cupcakes from everything from weddings to corporate events, all personally tailored. We’ve made icings to match bridesmaids’ dresses and added business logos to our corporate cupcakes”, Laragh says.

Bridal magazine Confetti have been championing cupcakes on their website for savvy brides and grooms, as a way of getting around cake cutting fees at hotel receptions.

Kate Deegan of BlossomBabies.ie, based in Monkstown, recently began selling cupcakes (€24 per dozen) alongside baby clothes, linen and blankets. Kate says, “I'm quite new to the scene but since I've started up there definitely has been an increase in popularity round here. Most of my orders are for kids parties, with an increasing number for weddings. I think people are increasingly thinking of cupcakes for weddings in an attempt to cut costs.”

Kate says individual traders who work from home with fewer overheads are a good bet for those wanting to cut costs, “Bakeries tend to charge quite a lot for each individual cupcake still. From browsing the wedding forums I gather that a lot of people are doing them themselves, with varying degrees of success. They still work out a lot less than a wedding cake, either way.”

Food pornographers Marks & Spencers are the first UK or Irish supermarket to develop an own-brand cupcake Matt McAuliffe, product developer for M&S, went to New York to research the perfect recipe. He told The Sunday Times,“In America, the ratio of sponge to buttercream is about two-thirds to one-third. That’s really sickly — it has been hard to make it palatable for British tastes.”

Mc Auliffe’s solution was to use fresh fruit to flavour the buttercream and add fruit compote to the sponge and voila the English cupcake was born.

Testing their glitter-dusted Strawberry & Vanilla cupcakes (four for €3.49), we found the icing was certainly less generous than a café cupcake, but also, less sickening.

The only downside of the M&S cakes is the availability of ‘nutritional’ information on the box. Yes, 20.4g of fat per cupcake is more information than we wanted to know, thank you. These figures are happily not available at cafes and bakeries, which gives the latter the edge.

But many must disagree. Our visit to Grafton Street’s food hall revealed that M&S cupcakes were selling like er…, hot cakes, while traditional favourites like almond fingers and fairy cakes languished on the shelves.

Fashion and hip sets are also reflecting this cupcake culture. Dublin club night Le Cirque and venue Seomra Spraoi lay out cupcake buffets to sweet-toothed scenesters, taking a break from the board games and colouring books on offer.

Urban and ‘Suburban’ Outfitters (the latter in Dundrum), unofficial authorities of the ‘trend index’, have been peddling the Magnolia Bakery recipe book, cupcake-shaped lip balms and cupcake motif t-shirts since 2006.

Sounds sweet, but it’s not all cuteness and light. Urban Counterfeiters, a watchdog consumer website, highlight how Boston designer Johnny Cupcakes’ trademark t-shirt “Make Cupcakes Not War” was copied by the trendy chain.

“A while after sending in samples of his t-shirts so that the mega chain might consider buying some off of him to sell in their stores, Johnny Cupcakes was notified by a friend that they were carrying them — without his knowledge. Turns out Urban took a concept off of one of his samples and made their own version.” Johnny Cupcakes successfully sued Urban Outfitters for an undisclosed sum.

The cupcakes rise as kitsch culture du jour is a curious one.

According to Google Trends, the word ‘Cupcake’ was googled more times than ‘financial crisis’ in September 2008, many say their popularity is indicative a return to safe, cheap and cheerful pleasures, and are a sweet diversion from reality.

Blogger, journalist and cake fancier, Kim Vallee says, “As comfort food, eating cupcakes can lessen the burden of the economic crisis for a few minutes.”

Earlier this month, Newsweek ran a feature on how the grim global economy is creating a boom in cheap and cheerful entertainment. The article surmised that in tough times, people gravitate to cheer pleasures to escape the reality of recession. If this is so, we may consider cupcakes the Slumdog Millionaire of the food world.

Symbolic of times, the formal navy façade of an estate agent in the village of Enniskerry in Co. Wicklow has been painted bright pink, to pave the way for a new old-fashioned cake shop, opening soon. It seems the trend, like the financial crisis, is showing little sign of abating.

Let them eat cake, indeed.

* Picture courtesy of Laragh Strahan of Lolly and Cooks, Dublin