The Tastemakers (5 page)

“More [cupcakeries] began popping up in every state,” said Sisson, “and that of course caused the independent bakeries to change cupcake programs, and then in-store bakeries jumped on the bandwagon. We then jumped all over the cupcake craze.” Cupcakes are now at the point of the trend's economic evolution at which they are moving into the mass market. “We meet with Walmart and talk to them about cupcakes being an important part of their bakery program,” Sisson said, estimating that there are already around eight to nine thousand independent cupcake bakeries in America alone. They are in big cities and small towns, red states and blue states, from I Love Cupcakes in Key Largo, Florida, to Kastle's Kreations, a cupcake truck in Eagle River, Alaska, and everywhere in between. Even if each bakery doesn't pull in the millions that a Sprinkles or Magnolia does, it's safe to say that the annual cupcake GDP in America is in the multibillion-dollar range.

The cupcake trend has also spawned a cottage industry of accessories and affiliated products that has generated untold millions more. Johnny's Cupcakes sells hip clothes with a cupcake-and-cross-bones pirate logo out of stores designed around a bakery look. On the weekend you can enjoy your red velvet cupcakes with a chilled bottle of Riesling from California's Cupcake Vineyards (one review calls it “overpoweringly sweet, creamy, with a touch of acidity on the finish”) or a cocktail with the company's brand of vodka, which comes in flavors such as Chiffon, Frosting, and Devil's Food. Houseware companies, from Sunbeam to Babycakes, sell electric cupcake-baking machines and decorating stations, including one shaped like Hello Kitty (presumably for the enthusiastic Asian market). There are cupcake-themed novels and children's toys, cupcake jewelry sold online, plastic cupcakes used to sell women's shoes (not to mention high heel–shaped cupcakes), and even a Sprinkles cupcake ATM machine in Los Angeles that takes cash or credit cards and in return dispenses cupcakes twenty-four hours a day.

The most significant cultural offshoot of the trend is television, which not only rakes in big money from advertising and syndication but also fuels cupcake growth even further by inspiring a wider audience to bake, buy, and sell cupcakes. The summer of 2010 saw the launch of the Food Network's
Cupcake Wars
, a fast-paced baking competition show that pitted teams of cupcake chefs against each other. Similar to Bravo's
Top Chef
or pretty much any other reality cooking show,
Cupcake Wars
features lots of running around, highly edited moments of “tension,” and catty judging from the likes of Sprinkles's Candace Nelson. A month after
Cupcake Wars
had its debut TLC premiered
DC Cupcake
, a show focused on the daily life of Washington's famed cupcakery Georgetown Cupcake, owned by sisters Sophie LaMontagne and Katherine Kallinis, who constantly struggle in each episode to get orders out the door just in time. The series premier of
DC Cupcake
drew over a million viewers, and many more watch each week as well as in reruns. The two times I visited Georgetown Cupcake the lineup (mostly tourists, though some locals) snaked up the block, even on a scorching summer day. Every person who walked in made sure to photograph their order, the surroundings, the cupcake they bought, and the act of eating that cupcake, photos that they instantly uploaded to social media, doing their part to keep spreading the trend around the world.

I
n November 2011 I was walking on a crowded street in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a man in front of me was talking on his cell phone:

“Yeah yeah, it was a fun party
 … 
yeah good wine, pretty girls, too
.…

The food? They had a big sushi bar, lots of sushi, and then all sorts of cupcakes
.…

Yes, cupcakes
.…

It's like a small cake. Like a sweet muffin. It's like a sweet muffin cake or some bullshit, I don't know. People were going crazy for them
.…

Yeah
 … 
CUP CAKE
 … 
like a cake in a cup. Who knows
 … 
it must be an American thing.”

I had lived in Buenos Aires from 2003 to 2005, and never once during that time had I heard about or set eyes on a cupcake, even for the birthdays of my expat American friends. Argentines love their sweets, especially anything filled or smeared with dulce de leche, and they tend to be pretty inflexible in their food choices. But in the years that I'd been gone not only had the cupcake arrived in Argentina; it had begun its spread around the party scene, pairing with sushi (a trend that was in full bloom when I lived there) to attain the same iconic status with upper-class tastemakers as it had in New York more than a decade before. At least half a dozen cupcakeries have since opened in Buenos Aires, each with its own highly stylized décor, website, and interior. Local and international media coverage on them inevitably makes reference to
Sex and the City
and Magnolia. Muma's Cupcakes, one of the most popular shops, with four locations (including one in Uruguay), has the song “Seasons of Love” from the
Rent
soundtrack playing on their website in an infinite loop, driving the bohemian spirit of the West Village into your brain like a frilly pink hammer.

Not even two decades into its rise, the humble cupcake has become a power instrument of globalization, spreading good old-fashioned American culture throughout the world. Spin a globe, put your finger down, and it's pretty much certain that cupcakes have begun appearing in whatever country you are pointing at. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, Cherry Blossom Cupcakes splits the market with Silver Lining Cupcakes, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, owner Kelsey Malaika McKinney claims her Dots Cupcakery is the “sassiest cupcake shop in all of East Africa,” something that Nairobi, Kenya's Just Cupcakes might dispute. The world's most expensive cupcake is, naturally, found in Dubai, going on sale in 2012 under the moniker the Golden Phoenix. For around $1,000 the discerning (or at least very wealthy) cupcake eater gets a cupcake with imported organic flour and butter, premium Italian cocoa, Ugandan vanilla beans, and the obligatory edible gold 23-karat sheet, all presented on a gold stand with a golden spoon, and strawberries dipped in edible gold. Home Made Cake sells cupcakes (as well as cakes) in Baghdad, Iraq, and although there isn't a dedicated cupcakery yet in Kabul,
Afghanistan, Christian American missionaries have reportedly been working there in recent years, teaching Afghan women to bake cupcakes so they can cater to Western aid workers and embassies.

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.”