Bakery Backlash: It's A Cupcake, Not A Puppy

By Hortense Smith | April 4, 2010 | 3:30pm

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Laura Atkinson of the Times of London is really, really sick of cupcakes: “No fashionable farmer’s market is complete without its home-made cupcake stall, staffed by fragrant women who are happy to charge £5 for each sickly creation.” Oh, snap!

Atkinson argues that cupcakes are essentially the it bags of the dessert industry; trendy, overpriced, and seemingly able to turn grown women into goofy little girls: “A recent visit to one of the many cupcake bakeries in London saw it packed with women in their thirties,” she writes, “cooing over the cutesy, calorie-jammed treats as if they were newborn babies, which for many is part of the problem.” The “adorable” factor attached to cupcakes is, in a way, a bit insane.

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It’s not really the treats themselves, but they way they are marketed and received; if you recall, a bakery in NYC recently opened up in order to provide “manly” cupcakes to customers who apparently found the typical cupcake to be a bit too feminine. The entire concept of attaching a gender to a baked good is relatively new (and can, like many things, be blamed on Sex and the City and I agree with Atkinson that cupcakes (which are totally delicious, btw, let’s not get it twisted, pie people) are suffering from cutesy-poo, dumb girlie marketing overload (shoes and yogurt, girlfriends!): “It seems the fact that cupcakes now represent a lifestyle choice,” she writes, “rather than just a nice bit of cake, is causing some serious bad feeling, with one dissenter describing those who like them as ‘the kind of women who speak in baby voices to their partner.'”

In other words: it’s CAKE, people! You don’t need to coo at it like it’s a tiny little baby otter in need of TLC. Just eat the damn thing. And do it properly, please, as my first grade teacher taught me: split the cupcake in half and flip the top so the frosting is in the middle. FROSTING SANDWICH. That’s not adorable, you guys. That’s just delicious. And honestly? Cupcakes, like all cakes, don’t need to be adorable to be superior to pie.

Enough With The Cupcakes Already [TimesOnline]

Earlier: The Butch Bakery: “Manly Cupcakes For Manly Men”