The Rise (and Fall?) of the Cupcake.

[Agschmid]

Monday may have been a sad day for cupcake obsessives the nation over. After more than a decade in business, Crumbs Bake Shop, the “largest chain to come out of the cupcake wars,” according to trend chronicler David Sax, will close all 48 of its stores, from sea to cupcake-eating sea.

How did we get here? Although the first mention of cupcakes can be traced to Amelia Simmons’s 1796 cookbook “American Cookery”—”a light cake to bake in small cups,” the tome reads—it wasn’t until 1997 that scores of cupcake lovers began queuing in front of the now-famous Magnolia Bakery in New York City.

Here’s a look at the trend’s ups and downs, from reality shows to cupcake ATMs. (And yes, according to Sax, the lines truly did start forming outside Magnolia before Carrie & Co.)

Is Crumbs’s downfall a sign that the cupcake is truly on its way out? We’ll leave that for you to decide.

Are cupcakes... done?!?! Yipes!

5 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	We've not yet reached peak cupcake.
	1 (20%)
	We've passed peak cupcake.
	3 (60%)
	I'd rather eat real cake.
	1 (20%)
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[Tommy_Carcetti]

1. Relax, people. They're still available in your supermarket bakery.

Available in a snap when you are going to someone's house and you think to yourself, "What, were we supposed to bring something for desert? What the hell are we going bring over for desert? Oh, hell, let's just stop at the supermarket and pick up some cupcakes and call it a day."

[OriginalGeek]

18. I love Publix for most things

but their standard sheet cakes suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Including the ones in cup form. It's the icing really - not sure what that glop is but it blows. But then they have that special section over there with all those fancy 40 dollar cakes full of fudge and chocolate and raspberry and those are pretty great. But I'm not paying 40 bucks for a 12" round cake.

[Agschmid]

28. Wegmans store stuff is pretty good they do a nice buttercream.

[Baitball Blogger]

22. Heathen!

[orleans]

2. cupcakes are far from over

they are the perfect little treat for children
on rainy days
birthday parties
halloween, christmas, valentine's parties
picnics, family reunions & gatherings
cookies & cupcakes for recitals & intermission breaks

the cupcake store may be over but they are still available at bakeries and grocery stores

[Agschmid]

3. As long as Magnolia stays open I'll be okay!

Without them... Lord knows what will happen!

[Bosonic]

4. Decentralisation

Make your own in 5 minutes (literally in a cup):

http://www.adventures-in-food.com/2011/01/5-minute-chocolate-cake-in-cup-aka-rich.html

[Agschmid]

7. Okay but have you had a Magnolia cupcake...

Cause that may change your view slightly.

[Chan790]

9. Yes.

I can make a better cupcake, albeit maybe not a prettier cupcake.

[Agschmid]

19. Where do I write my check?

[Chan790]

20. You can't.

I'm a trained Culinary Arts (job-retraining) program graduate, but I don't work as a chef or a baker. My job-retraining program went a long way to convincing me that as much as I love food, I never want to work in a restaurant. I take the occasional catering job, but that's it.

I will let you in on a secret. There's no place in a cupcake to skimp. Take whatever cupcake recipe you have and use cake flour instead of AP flour. Use organic eggs and real butter. Fresh flavors are better than extracts...but if you bake and use a lot of extracts, make your own. (So easy, it's where most of the spirits that I end up with goes since I don't drink.) Much higher quality. Nothing is a real replacement for aluminum-free double-action baking powder. So on. Learn to make a chocolate ganache...you'll never want for frosting again.

Now you too can make a divine cupcake.

[Agschmid]

25. I've never used cake flour, seems like an amazing idea!

[Chan790]

34. Oh, I forgot...add an additional 2Tbsp of cake flour to the recipe for every C of AP it calls for.

The lower protein content requires you to add flour. If you're experimenting {for softer mouth-feel, smaller/larger crumb, etc.} you may have to experiment slightly with ratios of flour to butter to liquid, making several batches before you find the one you like exactly.

The sugar article below provides a good overview of how all that works too.

More information on flour: http://www.joyofbaking.com/flour.html#ixzz1kDVpBeYX
More information on sugar: http://www.joyofbaking.com/sugar.html

[LiberalElite]

23. i had my first this week -

it was the last one left in the coffee room. Lemon blueberry. DAMN THAT WAS GOOD! Contrasted it with the only Crumbs cupcake I had a part of (because it was humongous) a couple months ago. I think it was red velvet cake. They were giving them away free in a Spiderman promotion. It tasted like it came from a commercial bakery. No comparison.

[DinahMoeHum]

5. Can the decline and fall of the "cake pop" be too far behind?

Those ugly travesties of the baking profession.

[Agschmid]

6. I agree on that part, one can only hope.

[Chan790]

8. The cupcake is evil, the cake-pop is a fucking lie.

Last edited Wed Jul 9, 2014, 12:26 PM - Edit history (1)

Once, there was cake. Cake was good. Cake was rare; a treat for someone's birthday or retirement. We didn't eat cake with any frequency and we were fine. Cake is moderation in baked sweets personified.

Then came the cupcake. The cupcake was personalized, individualized. The cupcake was libertarian antisocial cake, you could have your cake how you liked it and so could the person next to you. Lost was the communal experience of cake. Because of its dainty size, the cupcake could be a rare treat. No longer just for the birthday or the retirement, the cupcake could celebrate "Fuck yeah, it's Saturday!" We ate cupcake more often and we were less fine.

Cupcake begat mini-cupcake. Mini cupcake was just like cupcake but smaller...the ultimate in portion control sold in boxes of 6, 5, 4, fuck it, I'll diet tomorrow. Mini-cupcake celebrated smaller victories, like "Look, 7-11 has mini-cupcakes!" We could mini-cupcake every day and we were no longer fine, though we thought we were if we looked askance at the treadmill.

That brought us to cake-pop; a single mouthful of cake served on a stick. What harm could one bite of cake do? I'll have 20 please, don't scrimp on the frosting and decorations. Every day I'm cake-popping and holy fuck when did I get obese? How could you do this to me, cake pop?! I thought we had an understanding.

[Agschmid]

12. LMAO.

Amazing.

[charlie and algernon]

13. I wish I could rec this post.

[Agschmid]

26. Me too...

Basically it should be an OP of it's own!

[PasadenaTrudy]

10. I love them!

It's just me so I don't want a whole damn cake!

[Arugula Latte]

36. They are the perfect size.

And you seem to get more frosting with a cupcake than with a piece of cake.

[Inkfreak]

11. Pies. Now that's where it's at. Pies. (nt)

[Avalux]

16. Tiny pies! Tiny adorable yummy PIES!!

http://www.tinypies.com/

[From The Ashes]

14. Its not the fall of the cupcake...yet.

I think 'Crumbs' went out because, who in their right mind would pay that much for *1* freeking cupcake?!?

[closeupready]

15. Crumbs' cupcakes? The biggest problem was lack of flavor.

If you're going to splurge on carbs for a snack, make it worth the price and weight gain, but Crumbs somehow seemed incapable of making a cupcake with cake that tasted like anything. Buttery? Yes. Light and fluffy? Yes. But the red and pink and turquoise cakes all tasted exactly the same.

[Aristus]

17. I can't count how many cupcake places have opened and then quickly closed again around here.

It must be the small business with the shortest life expectancy.

I don't know why they went out of business, unless their proprietors were poor business people.

Their cupcakes were delicious.

[Chan790]

21. You hit the nail on the head.

It's a hard market and a lot of people who have no bakery experience or real experience in retail food jump into it having no idea what they're doing.

To successfully run a cupcake shop...you don't just have to know how to bake cupcakes. You need to know how to market and sell product, run a business, how a bakery runs; it wouldn't hurt to be a trained barista either, nobody wants a cupcake without a beverage to accompany it. Beyond all that, you need something to set you apart.

The difference between a successful cupcake shop and unsuccessful cupcake shop is tiny. If you want to learn how to run that kind of business the best advice I can give isn't "Learn to make cupcakes", it's "go do 9 months at Starbucks"...not to become a barista (doesn't hurt) but because it's a tutorial on how to run that kind of business.

[Reter]

24. No one should be eating cupcakes, cookies, or anything like that more than once a month

All that stuff is doing is killing us and causing excessive body fat. But I guess I'm the bad guy here. Want a snack? Snack on fruit or even natural peanut butter.

[Agschmid]

27. You sound like Alyssa... My personal trainer.

You aren't wrong by any means... It's just not the most popular idea.

See this Harvard law blog entry:

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I wanted to discuss an important issue: Can the FDA ban cupcakes? While this may seem like a silly question, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (“CSPI”) has filed a petition with the FDA urging the agency to regulate the amount of sugar (including high fructose corn syrup) in soft drinks. According to the executive director of CSPI, sugar is a “slow-acting but ruthlessly efficient bioweapon” that causes “obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.”

If soft drinks are a problem, surely cupcakes are too. A twelve-ounce can of Coca-Cola contains 39 grams of sugar. A seasonally-appropriate red velvet cupcake from Sprinkles contains 45 grams of sugar—and who can eat just one? National cupcake consumption increased 52% between 2010 and 2011, and U.S. consumers ate over 770 million cupcakes last year. Sugary soft drink consumption, on the other hand, is down 23% since 1998 and 37% since 2000.

While the FDA can’t regulate sugar as a bioweapon, it probably could regulate sugar as a food additive. Under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, a food additive is “any substance the intended use of which results or may reasonably be expected to result—directly or indirectly—in its becoming a component or otherwise affecting the characteristics of any food.” This broad definition would include sugar. The FDA does not, however, regulate food additives that are “generally recognized as safe” (“GRAS”). Presumably the FDA considers sugar to be GRAS—for now.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2013/02/14/can-the-fda-ban-cupcakes/

[Iggo]

30. Geez! Take it easy on yerself there, sport.

[Iggo]

29. I seem to remember cupcakes doing okay before 1997.

I ain't worried.

[Agschmid]

31. Then came the cupcake dark ages...

Where cupcakes lived on top of one another and had to share their frosting to survive.... This was known as the time of the whoopsie pie. It was a dark time.

[Iggo]

32. The horror! The horror!

[Agschmid]

33. I know look how skinny the cupcakes were!

Malnourishment was rampant, in the land of whoopie.

[mnhtnbb]

35. Not for little girl's birthday parties