Paris, My Sweet (4 page)

As I blazed my personal cupcake trail, Carrie Bradshaw and Miranda Hobbes sent the whole world into a cupcake tizzy. Once those two sat chomping into their pink frosted cupcakes, dishing on Aidan, in the third season of
Sex
and
the
City
, the
petits gâteaux
became inescapable. And Magnolia Bakery, the location of their sweet moment, went from modestly successful to insanely popular to polarizing and reviled.

Magnolia was started in July of 1996 by two friends, Allysa Torey and Jennifer Appel. On a quiet corner in the West Village, they launched a genius concept: old-fashioned baked goods—perfectly frosted three-layer cakes, freshly baked pies dusted with cinnamon, fudgy brownies, and tart lemon squares—served up in an adorable, wholesome space that could have been Betty Crocker's own kitchen. But as the business soared, the women's relationship soured. Three years after opening, they split, with Allysa running the original bakery solo, and Jennifer moving to Midtown to open Buttercup, a bakery with virtually the same exact menu and aesthetic. Both of them churned out pretty pastel cupcakes, and the city ate them up.

Buttercup, probably because of its unsexy midtown location, fared just okay, but Magnolia went gangbusters. The more popular it became, the more people loved to hate it. The staff was infamously snippy. The lines, which grew so long they snaked out the door and around the corner, started annoying the neighbors. Then the
Sex
and
the
City
tour buses rolled in and put everyone over the top. The bakery and its cupcakes became synonymous with Carrie Bradshaw wannabes, tottering in their heels and not caring about on whose front stoop they were dropping their frosting-laced wrappers.

The cupcakes themselves were hit or miss, love 'em or hate 'em. While cake flavors were the standard yellow, chocolate, and red velvet, and generally tasty, it was the frosting that sent everyone spiraling. It was über sweet, pastel-colored, dotted with vibrant sprinkles, and swirled on in abundance. These little cakes became the downtown must-have accessory, as fashionable as the T-shirts and coin purses Marc Jacobs was peddling across the street.

Meanwhile, other cupcakeries were popping up all over Manhattan. A near Magnolia replica turned up in Chelsea when a former bakery manager jumped ship to open his Americana bakeshop, Billy's (the one AJ and I frequented). Two Buttercup employees similarly ventured downtown to the Lower East Side and opened Sugar Sweet Sunshine, expanding into new flavors like the Lemon Yummy, lemon cake with lemon buttercream, and the Ooey Gooey, chocolate cake with chocolate almond frosting.
Dee
-licious.

Other bakeries opted for their own approach. A husband-and-wife team opened Crumbs, purveyor of five-hundred-calorie softball-sized juggernauts, in outrageous flavors like Chocolate Pecan Pie and Coffee Toffee, topped with candy shards and cookie bits. There were also mini cupcakes in wacky flavors like chocolate chip pancake and peanut butter and jelly from Baked by Melissa and Kumquat's more gourmet array like lemon-lavender and maple-bacon.

Revered pastry chefs also got in on the action. After opening ChikaLicious, the city's first dessert bar, Chika Tillman launched a take-out spot across the street that offered Valrhona chocolate buttercream-topped cupcakes. And Pichet Ong, a Jean-Georges Vongerichten alum and dessert bar and bakery rock star, attracted legions of loyal fans—no one more than myself—to his West Village bakery, Batch, with his carrot salted-caramel cupcake.

By 2009, dozens of bakeries vied for the title of Best Cupcake in New York. There were literally hundreds of flavors, sizes, and styles; they were sold with different philosophies, and sometimes even rules applied (no more than six cupcakes for you, missy!). Surely, the city could only stomach so much sugar? A cupcake crash was inevitable, though it took years longer than I ever expected.

It had been almost two months since I had arrived in Paris. I still hadn't experienced a free-falling sugar crash, though I
was
beginning to feel a little schizophrenic. One minute, I'd be ecstatically doing the cha-cha in my tree house, and the next, I'd be cursing the six flights of stairs that kicked my ass to get up there. After a day of being unable to conceal my big American smile, someone would be rude to me and my chin would start trembling with hurt. Which led to doubt, which led to me feeling like a seven-year-old being ostracized on the playground, doomed never to fit in. I'd reprimand myself:
Buck
up! Get over it! You're living your dream, you have no right to be sad or feel sorry for yourself!

But after a couple months away from home, my confidence was taking a beating in the face of so many changes and challenges. It was a salty-sweet mélange of excitement and dread. Bliss and dismay. Giddiness and loneliness. I had already gotten myself right back up from the ground after flying over the handlebars of a Vélib' one time, but on a Saturday afternoon, after having fallen down the stairs of a boutique, horribly embarrassing myself, butchering my knee and, worst of all, ruining my brand new Robert Clergerie
talons hauts
, I limped home, confidence shattered along with tough-girl façade. I called AJ.

“Hello?” a very sleepy voice answered. I looked at my clock and only then did the math.
Merde
. It was 9:00 a.m. in New York.

“Hi. Did I wake you?”

“No, no,” AJ valiantly said from across the ocean. “Don't worry about it. How are you?” I could hear her getting up. She never would have ignored a call from me. Even though I relied on her altruism, it still astounded me.

“Mmmm…I'm okay…” I found myself hedging, for some reason not wanting to say anything negative about Paris or my feeling vulnerable, even though it's why I had called.

“Aim, hold on, just a sec, sorry.” I heard AJ covering the mouthpiece, followed by muffled conversation. Hmmmm…she wasn't alone? I knew she had started dating someone right around the time I moved, but I'd be surprised if he was already spending the night. Come to think of it, she had been very mum about men lately, which, according to my knowledge of her dating behavior, developed from two-plus decades of experience, meant it was nothing serious. She would have been sharing blow-by-blow info if there was someone worth talking about. Turns out, I was wrong.

“Who was
that
?” I asked when she returned to the phone.

“Hold on,” and I heard the door click behind her. A moment later, she was revealing that it was Mitchell, the very same guy she started seeing when I moved to Paris—and they were indeed getting serious. In fact, they were all but inseparable.

I was, well, shell-shocked—which at least distracted me from my now-throbbing knee. I hadn't even remembered this guy's name, for crying out loud, and he was suddenly important in my best friend's life? “So what makes him different? What have you guys been doing together? What's the deal?” I asked quick-fire, as if I were interviewing her for an article.

“Well, he's just pretty amazing, you know? He's smart and edgy. He's cool. And he's from the Midwest, so we have a lot of shared values, which is becoming more important to me.” As AJ went on, I felt like I had entered a time warp.
Wait
a
minute
, I thought.
In
the
time
I've been trying to decipher my cable box in French, she's met someone edgy and cool who she feels compatible with?

Sure, I was also having a love affair—with a city. But AJ was smitten with a man. I could hear it in her voice. And while I was happy for my best friend, I also started feeling sorry for myself. After weeks of exerting so much effort and trying so hard to acclimate, I was tired. Frustrated. Lonely and uncertain. I had Michael and was becoming friendly with another writer at Ogilvy, but these weren't friends I could call in this vulnerable state and hash through my feelings over cocktails. A fierce wave of alienation nearly knocked me over when AJ and I hung up.
What
was
I
doing
here?
I looked around my tree house, which suddenly felt foreign. I needed a taste of home, I decided, no matter how small.

Right before my arrival in Paris, two sisters—Rebecca and Maggie Bellity—opened Cupcakes & Co. in the eleventh arrondissement. They had traveled throughout the States and been inspired by the cupcake trend that had spread across the country. When they returned to Paris in the fall of 2008, they set up what was then Paris's sole cupcake bakery, making a name for themselves by not only featuring these funny little foreign treats, but also touting natural and organic ingredients, another hot foodie trend. As I coasted on a Vélib' through the unfamiliar backstreets behind the Bastille, searching for this itty-bitty spot I had read about, I was filled with anticipation. Would their cupcakes be as good as those in the States?

When I arrived, the afternoon sun was spilling through the picture window onto the bakery's one table. The space was tiny. The menu, however, was not. Choosing between five or ten cupcake flavors, the number most New York bakeries offered, was hard enough. But Cupcakes & Co. had over twenty varieties, and they all sounded heavenly: coffee and hazelnut, poppy seed with orange cream cheese frosting, vanilla bourbon cake with glazed figs and pine nuts.
Miam
, my new favorite word popped into my head—the French equivalent of
yum
.

I stood like a clueless American tourist, cross-referencing the descriptions on the chalkboard menu with the pretty creations in the display case. There were many unfamiliar words—
fondant chocolat
and
ganache au beurre
—which I filed away for future reference. Face scrunched in concentration, I tortured myself making this very important decision. While I knew a cupcake would momentarily transport me back to New York, the connection went deeper and further than that. It took me back to when I was an awkward third grader, alone in the world for the very first time.

I was eight when my parents got divorced and my mom shepherded me and my older brother, Chris, from our home in Hartford, Connecticut, to the shoreline where she grew up. When we left my neighborhood friends and our grand old house, I cried with heartache and disbelief. What would I do without my two best friends right next door? How could I live without the big Douglas fir outside my bedroom window? Who would make runs to the drugstore for strawberry Charleston Chews and nutty Whatchamacallits with me? Now when the yellow bus dropped me off from school, I had to unlock the front door of our raised ranch with my own key that I hyperconsciously carried in my front pocket. I was a latchkey kid. For the first time in my life, I was all alone.

But if the house was empty every day when I got home from school, at least the bread drawer was always full. Devil Dogs and Twinkies, Ho Hos and Chocodiles, Chips Ahoy and Nutter Butters, Oreos and Fudge Stripes, Scooter Pies and Pinwheels, Entenmann's danishes and Pillsbury pastries, brownies and blondies, chocolate cake and carrot cake, Linzer torts and cherry pie, coffee cake and jelly doughnuts, jelly beans and licorice whips, Swedish fish and gummy worms, M&Ms and bridge mix, Kit Kats and Twix, ice cream and popsicles, Fruit Loops and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Pepperidge Farm and Keebler, Hostess and Drake's, Mars and Cadbury…