Where Does the Cupcake Stand?
20 years after their Gourmet heyday, what are these little cakes up to?
Hello, hello. I’m back on the cake grind this week with a missive about smol cakes, or cupcakes. Toward the end of this newsletter, behind the paywall, is my take on the state of cupcakes today and a recommendation for two very good cupcake shops in New York (fwiw, it does not include the usual suspects like Magnolia, Little Cupcake Bakeshop, or Buttercup Bakeshop).
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Before I was a Michelin inspector, wielding my discerning palate in service of a century-old restaurant guide book from France, I was a baker. Well, an aspiring baker.
In 2010 I was going through something of a quarter-career crisis and the world of food intrigued me. I wanted to see if I had a place in it and going to culinary school felt like a smart way to figure that out. A prerequisite for culinary school was kitchen experience, which felt a little cart-before-the-horse to be honest, but I set out to acquire some anyway. I found a trendy bakery in the West Village that was willing to give me a few hours of work on Sunday mornings and because it was 2010, the height of cupcake mania in New York City, I was going to be mixing, baking, and frosting cupcakes. Lots and lots of cupcakes.
It's gone now, but the bakery was called Sweet Revenge and it sold cupcakes in flavors like Crimson and Cream (raspberry red velvet) and “Dirty” (Valrhona chocolate). Each one was encased in parchment paper and came with a signature three-stripe piping of frosting on top — and a wine pairing if you were interested. The whole operation felt like a sophisticated evolution of Magnolia’s sweetly pretty cakes.
In any case, this story isn’t about me, it’s about cupcakes. My initial foray into the food world just happened to intersect with the cupcake’s speedy elevation to national craze. But how did they get there? Where are they now?
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Cupcakes, like cookies and brownies, are unpretentious desserts. I realize that’s a bit like calling the sticky zipper on your old winter jacket “stubborn” or your prolific house plant “overzealous.” Cake itself can’t be anything other than food, it’s our own projections that give inanimate objects meaning, turning them into symbols of culturally embedded sentiment. So, per the culture, cupcakes are humble desserts.
For a long time, they were associated with the domesticity of home. In New York City at least, it was rare for a bakery to specialize in just cupcakes and rarer still for a restaurant to offer them for dessert (actually, this is still rare, and I’m not sure why). Maybe it’s because cupcakes are relatively easy to make. The batter is simple and more forgiving than, say, a souffle. Unlike a cake, cupcakes bake quickly and thoroughly in a matter of minutes.
Maybe the cupcake’s Americanness, which is just another shade of domesticity, makes it seem kind of ordinary. Historically, imported cuisines, foreign philosophies of eating, and foods made with skills and techniques learned in other countries have carried more weight in dining culture than anything locally cultivated. (We’re unlearning all that now, with greater appreciation for Indigenous, Black, and hyphenated regional cuisines, like Mexican-American or Chinese-American.)
Cupcakes are also indisputably childlike. They are an easy finger food, sensibly portioned for little ones with big appetites for sugar (like my daughter, at least). They are staples at classroom birthday celebrations and are the currency of school bake sales. When I think of a cupcake, my mind immediately goes to my child, and to my childhood.
Years of this kind of conditioning has led me to see cupcakes as disarming and cute, albeit with a slightly condescending gaze. They are, somehow, less serious than other desserts. To describe them as simple takes on a pejorative tone.
And yet, in 1996, the co-owners of Magnolia Bakery, Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey, thought it would be a good idea to bake some leftover cake batter in muffin tins and sell the little cakes at their new bakery in the West Village. It’s a quaint origin story for what we now know was the birth of a new era in cupcake bakery — the gourmet cupcake era.
Appel and Torey’s cupcakes soon became their best-selling item. A New York Times article attributed this success to nostalgia, of course. “Bakers agree that the swelling trade in cupcakes is all about a combination of childhood and chic,” wrote the Times’ Julia Moskin. “Cupcakes have a kind of universal nostalgic appeal.”
From its West Village perch, the humble cupcake was recast as a symbol of cool. In 2000, the message reached a national audience when, in season three of Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker (as Carrie Bradshaw) ate a pink frosted vanilla cupcake outside the original Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street. Bradshaw’s character was a fashion it girlie living a life of enviable privilege. Anyone who wanted to emulate that kind of glamor could stand in line to buy a Magnolia cupcake, sit on a bench nearby, and cosplay Carrie.
And yet, despite the mass hysteria, cupcakes were still not exactly material for the front pages of a magazine like Gourmet, which the late food writer Molly O’Neill described in a piece called Food Porn as “aimed at a small social elite that … viewed fine dining much as it did art, theater, or opera: as something one need only appreciate in order to possess.” To these tastemakers, cupcakes were still very much a “plebeian food,” as Ruth Reichl, the former editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, once put it.
So, in 2004, it was sort of revolutionary when Reichl and the editors at Gourmet magazine did put a cupcake, a whole stack of them in fact, on the cover of the January issue. “We had unwittingly sent a message to the readers,” Reichl said in a 2019 interview. “We were saying that food trends — which at one point had come from the tables of the king, from royalty, from the elite down to the masses — were now working the other way.”
It was official: Gourmet magazine had christened the cupcake, once a plebeian food, now fit for a gourmet.
But really, the cupcake trend was just a democratization of leisure. Maybe that’s what offended all those fancy food people. Leisure has been defined as an action that is inessential and, well, dessert in the form of cupcakes is the epitome of unnecessary consumption (we need whole foods, not refined sugar). Historically, this kind of conspicuous uselessness was only available to a privileged few. At $5 or less, a cupcake was an expense almost anyone could afford.
And finally, the Great Recession of 2008 was hugely influential in how we ate in the late-aughts. Economists used to say women’s hemlines were indexed against the economy (shorter skirts meant a better economy and wow, can you imagine living in a time where that was just a normal way to talk about things?), but how we eat is equally predictive — in times of economic hardship, it’s maximum comfort at minimum cost. Even an overpriced cupcake could answer that call.
The Sex and the City Hollywood endorsement, the acquiescence at Gourmet magazine, the “right time right place” happenstance all set gourmet cupcakes on an irreversible path to becoming a pop culture phenomenon. They earned their status as a luxury food, standing in for tiered cakes at weddings and popping up in boutique-like bakeries next to fashion brands like Marc Jacobs. Soon, outposts of gourmet cupcake stores like Crumbs and Sprinkles were opening from coast to coast.
And yet, cupcakes themselves hadn’t changed all that much. Sometimes they were a little bigger, like the Crumbs versions. Some were made with more sophisticated ingredients, like the Valrhona chocolate cupcakes at Sweet Revenge. But to me, cupcakes were still pretty earnest and innocuous, like Anne Hathaway in her Devil Wears Prada era (relatedly, but also not, Anne Hathaway knows how to eat a cupcake).
In more formal terms, cupcakes occupied the split habitus of simultaneously being both high and low brow. Like pairing potato chips with crème fraîche and caviar, the gourmet cupcake blurred the distinction between refined and colloquial. It was the epitome of social mobility, moving from the ordinary household occasion into the realm of something more noteworthy. From the child’s unserious grasp to the grand pedestal of chicness and luxury.
But all that was short lived because as we know, the cupcake trend didn’t last. Some say it was because Crumbs expanded too fast, inundating the market with its oversized cupcakes that were, honestly, just okay. (Note the irony of cupcakes, a mass commodity, losing its prestige after…mass commodification.) Others say it was the appearance of a new trend, the Cronut. As with any fast and fashionable thing, one day you’re in, the next day, you’re out.
In any case, people largely moved on from cupcakes. Or maybe it was the invisible hand of Wall Street that moved on — The Wall Street Journal was widely quoted as saying the cupcake bubble had burst, presumably turning off any lingering investors. The rest of us just went back to loving cupcakes the same way we always had.
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