The Tastemakers Page 2

  For most of the latter half of the twentieth century cupcakes were a North American bakery fixture along with cookies, brownies, and other sweets occupying space in the display case. They came in vanilla and chocolate and were iced in the same two flavors, though the icing, which could be buttercream, ganache, or some processed variation, rarely amounted to more than 20 percent of the whole cake. Often they were topped with sprinkles, either chocolate or rainbow, or sometimes those silver-coated sugar ball bearings, called dragée, that rip through your molars like a diamond drill and are legally considered inedible by the Food and Drug Administration.

  During the 1970s and 1980s muffins, not cupcakes, were the star of the bakery business, spurned by the high-fiber diet trend, which was believed to combat heart disease and other ailments. Bran muffins were a fixture atop diner counters and coffee shops everywhere, along with their cohorts, blueberry, banana, carrot, and chocolate chip. There were sugar-free muffins and frozen muffins, miniature muffins and giant muffins, muffin mixes and muffin franchises, including my personal favorite, mmmuffins, a Toronto bakery chain where the crisp top of the muffin was the size of a portobello mmmushroom. Every bakery worth their oven was into muffins, and Ann Warren, in New York City, was no exception.

  “We actually opened up doing homemade-style donuts,” recalled Warren, “but it was really part of the muffin thing when we opened in 1987. Muffins were very, very big. I mean literally. People were into very large muffins.” She made these muffins to sell to other cafés and restaurants, but when a retail space opened up in their Chelsea neighborhood a year later, Warren and her husband figured that selling directly to the public might be an easier way to approach baking. They sold coffee and donuts, muffins, pies, and cakes, and because there was so much cake batter and an abundance of empty muffin pans in the afternoon, they made cupcakes as well. They called the bakery Cupcake Café.

  “We weren’t even trying to be a cupcake café,” said Warren by phone, speaking between baking shifts at the Cupcake Café. “We just came up with the name, really, because we liked the association between cake and a cup of coffee,” not, she insists, because they were bullish on cupcakes. As the realization emerged among customers that most muffins, even if they were made with bran and raisins, were in fact no healthier than the stick of butter they were made from, the muffin trend quickly faded. In response, Warren increasingly filled those vacant muffin tins with batter for cupcakes, which, she calculated, were less of a caloric indulgence than even a bagel and cream cheese.

  Warren’s cupcakes were comforting, pretty affairs—a moist cake base with a thin ganache frosting and a small buttercream flower on top—but they never kicked off any significant uptick in cupcake buying. Sure, she had a steady stream of clients, some of whom bought cupcakes, but people mostly came to the Cupcake Café for coffee and other baked goods. Cupcakes were popular there, but like most other bakeries, Cupcake Café largely sold them to children or for birthday parties. One customer who frequented Cupcake Café in the early nineties was the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who was starring in a Broadway play nearby. “She used to come in, sit at the back table with my daughter, and have her coffee,” recalls Warren, though she can’t specifically remember Parker eating a cupcake. It’s easy to imagine Parker, sipping her coffee and reading the newspaper as Warren walked by her with a freshly iced tray of cupcakes, neither of them realizing the significance of the moment as a future trend and its tastemaker passed unknown.

  Like Cupcake Café, the Magnolia Bakery was not initially conceived as a business dedicated to cupcakes. In July 1996, when Jennifer Appel, a clinical psychologist, and her high school friend Alyssa Torey, who was working in her family’s restaurant business, first opened up their seven hundred–square-foot retro-themed bakery in the West Village, less than two miles from the Cupcake Café, the only cakes they sold were Eastern European–style bundt cakes. “We were doing more bars, squares, sticky buns, muffins, and coffee cakes,” recalls Appel. By September that year, neighborhood customers who liked Magnolia’s products were requesting birthday cakes and other special occasion cakes from the two owners, even though they weren’t on the menu. “People asked, ‘Do you have birthday cakes?’ and we realized, oh yeah, we kinda missed that,” said Appel. Torey had a passion for southern food and baked goods, and she sought to re-create the fluffy, daintily iced, brightly colored layer cakes commonly found in the Deep South at church lunches, society teas, and country diners. However, the first two cakes someone ordered were different sizes—one in a nine-inch pan and one in a seven-inch pan—and Torey, like Warren, was left with excess batter.

  She went to the deli next door, bought paper cupcake holders, and history was made. “We poured the batter into the leftover muffin tins from breakfast,” recalled Torey. “We made a dozen extra cupcakes from the batter.” Each time they baked cakes more cupcakes were the consequence. These cupcakes were in traditional flavors like chocolate, vanilla, and red velvet (basically chocolate with red dye), topped with a whirlpool swirl of buttercream icing in pink, lavender, and baby blue pastels that straddled the line between deliberate precision and homespun imperfection. They sold each for a dollar and a quarter. “People really liked them,” Torey said. “So we started making cupcakes intentionally.” By the end of the year word started to spread. Because the cupcakes were still a by-product of full-sized cakes and the tiny bakery had a limited staff and hours, their supply was small, so Magnolia’s cupcakes frequently sold out before the end of the day. “Customers said, ‘Where are the cupcakes?’ ” recalled Appel, “and it became obvious pretty quickly that cupcakes were becoming the number-one priority.”

  Magnolia’s cupcakes steadily grew in popularity, first in the neighborhood and then around the rest of New York City. “It became a destination,” said Appel. “You’d walk down from the Upper East Side to the West Village for a cupcake, like you’d do with your favorite slice of pizza.” By 1997 Magnolia Bakery witnessed its first cupcake lineups forming outside the shop, and these soon snaked around the block. The shop instituted a hard limit of a dozen cupcakes per customer, which infuriated some but helped manage the incessant demand. These customers weren’t exclusively children and their parents; in fact, they were largely adults—single and married, older and professional—who wouldn’t come for a box of cupcakes but rather a singular, handheld indulgence that they had specifically traveled there to acquire. Each time the cupcakes ran out (eliciting groans from the people in the lineup, who watched them disappear from the window, one at a time), their currency rose in value. The harder they were to obtain, the more people wanted those cupcakes.

  Magnolia Bakery was increasingly generating small local press clippings, though the first articles about the bakery didn’t even mention the cupcakes. A few in-flight magazines flagged them as a destination for visitors to New York, but the first mention of their cupcakes in the New York Times only happened in early 1999, and it was very brief, just a few lines in a short story on the cupcake’s potential revival, and also included mention of the Cupcake Café and several others. Still, the bakery was popular enough with the right people (cultural tastemakers in the media, fashion, and arts) that Torey and Appel were offered a book deal in 1998 with Simon and Schuster. By the time The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook was published in the fall of 1999, with a sun-drenched photograph of two full-sized cakes on the cover (one chocolate, the other coconut), much had changed at the bakery.

  Appel and Torey’s relationship had strained under the pressure of the business and the rapid success that the nascent cupcake mania brought with it. They jostled in the hot, cramped kitchen and argued over expansion plans with the passion that only old friends who go into business together can do. Finally, it reached a point at which Appel could take no more, and in 1999 she sold her share of Magnolia Bakery to Torey. Soon after, Appel opened the Buttercup Bake Shop uptown, specializing in the colorful, comforting baked goods that she sold at Magnolia, with a strong portfolio of cupcakes. Their riv
alry only fueled New York’s growing cupcake obsession, which was about to tip into a full-fledged national cultural food trend with a bite heard round the world.

  Sex and the City, Season III, Episode V “No Ifs, Ands, or Butts.” Air Date: July 9, 2000.

  Miranda and Carrie are sitting on a bench outside the Magnolia Bakery. Miranda wears flats, blue slacks, and an oversized red trench coat that matches her hair and lipstick. Carrie wears a dark blazer, gray linen dress, a silk scarf, and knee-high wool socks with chunky heels. Miranda holds a cup of coffee to her lips, while Carrie unpeels a vanilla cupcake with vibrant pink frosting.

  Carrie: I have a crush.

  Miranda: Yeah?

  Carrie: Yup.

  Miranda: Good. You haven’t had a real crush in a while.

  Not since Big.

  Carrie: Big wasn’t a crush. He was a crash.

  Camera cuts in tight on Carrie as she takes a large bite of the cupcake. Cut to a wide shot, where she licks crumbs and icing from sides of mouth.

  Carrie: His name is Aiden, and I believe him to be very cute.

  End Scene.

  When I finally watched the infamous “cupcake scene” from Sex and the City, I was astounded by a few things. First, it is incredibly, unthinkably short, just twenty seconds, or about 1/90th the length of the episode. I can barely get the wrapper off a cupcake in that amount of time, let alone chew and swallow a bite without choking. Second, there is no mention of the cupcake Carrie eats. No “great cupcake,” no “mmmmm,” no talk of anything except men. Third, aside from the first second of the scene, which shows the Magnolia sign, there is no mention of the bakery and no other sight of its name. Finally, it happens to be the only time in the show’s history that anyone, let alone its lead protagonist, ate a cupcake. This is surprising, because the other trends that emerged from Sex and the City—cosmopolitan martinis, Manolo Blahnik high-heeled shoes, the Rabbit vibrator—were either constant fixtures over the life of the series or central to an episode’s plot.

  How, then, did this brief moment in television become the proverbial beat of a butterfly’s wings that unleashed a hurricane of cupcakes onto the world? How did that one bite spawn the defining food trend of our age?

  Georgette Blau believes she has the answer. In 1999 she started On Location Tours, which began offering its Sex and the City Hotspots Tour in 2001, a year after the cupcake scene aired. “We made Sex and the City synonymous with the cupcake,” said Blau as we spoke in her Manhattan office, which was jammed, wall to wall, with framed articles from around the world mentioning the tour. Prior to the tour the cupcake scene was just a blip on the radar, accessible only to fans who saw that episode, lived in New York, and could recognize Magnolia in that first second of footage. “No one noticed. But then I did the tour, and cupcakes became synonymous with the show. The tour distilled the show down to key things,” she said. “It’s about fashion, eating, drinking, and sex.” In other words, Manolos, cupcakes, cosmos, and Rabbit vibrators, all of which are incorporated into the tour in one way or another.

  Appel, who has never even seen an episode of Sex and the City, noticed a change very quickly in Buttercup Bake Shop’s business, which saw double-digit growth every year after the episode aired until the recession of 2008. It also shifted the demographics of cupcake eaters significantly. “Cupcakes changed from family-oriented customers to a tourist from Kansas saying, ‘I need to go to Magnolia,’ ” she said, noting that her average customer became a size-four, twenty-seven-year-old female (though she still loves when big burly men come into her shop and say, “I’ll have the pink one”).

  Initially the Sex and the City Hotspots Tour supplied their cupcakes from Magnolia, right across from their West Village midpoint stop, but after a few weeks that ended, as Magnolia’s quantity limits were causing friction with the tour and the bus passengers were irritating customers in line. Blau switched to Buttercup Bake Shop for the tour’s supply soon after, and the cupcakes rode in the bus until the West Village, where the bus still stopped by Magnolia, but its passengers were fed its competitor’s cupcakes. More recently the tour’s cupcakes, including the ones I ate, have been supplied by Billy’s, a bakery run by another former Magnolia employee.

  This was how the cupcake phenomenon initially spread: organically, from New York bakery to New York bakery, as bakers and cashiers and enterprising shopkeepers of Magnolia and its offshoots saw the success around them, looked at the lineups, the backlog of orders, the cash registers stuffed with thousands of dollars, and, like ambitious gangsters unhappy with their cut of the action, struck out on their own. Each new shop sought to be bigger, better, cuter, pinker, more elaborate, and more in tune with the strong single female image that the cupcake had risen to glory feeding. Each new cupcakery (a term that soon emerged) opening in New York tried to differentiate themselves in some unique way, whether it was minicupcakes, oversized cupcakes, stuffed cupcakes, frozen cupcakes, savory cupcakes, booze-filled cupcakes, or customizable vanity cupcakes with your face on the icing. Each new metamorphosis to the trend generated a sense of excitement and media attention, a cultural bonfire fueled by cupcakes.

  Everyone, that is, except the Cupcake Café’s Ann Warren, who watched the cupcake’s wild success pass by her front window. “Magnolia and others took our idea and went crazy with it,” said Warren. “They took our decor and went nuts with it. I mean, what can I say. We can’t even pay our mortgage! I find the whole media coverage of it absolutely amazing and utterly ridiculous. A cupcake is a cupcake. Even a really nice cupcake is just a cupcake. I find it somewhat surreal. If I’d known when I was starting out, I might have gone in another direction. I don’t understand it, and I know it’s media driven, but I just find it, frankly, a little sick and tragic that something that’s not really good for you is connected with being young and sexy and running around in high heels.”

  Why cupcakes?

  That’s the question that keeps Warren, muffin bakers, food writers, and flour suppliers up at night. Even well over a decade later the cupcake trend continues to baffle them. How did this child’s cake, the simplest of treats that had been around for over a century, suddenly transform into a pink-frosted juggernaut in such a short period of time, and why did it happen when it did?

  It’s worth remembering that the cupcake trend’s greatest period of growth happened in New York in the years following the September 11 attacks, which were not that far, geographically, from Magnolia and the epicenter of the cupcake craze. “September 11 unleashed this desire for a sense of security and pleasure and associations with a simpler, easier, sweeter time,” said Christopher Noxon, a friend and journalist whose 2006 book, Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up, examined the phenomenon in which childhood things, like Converse sneakers, cartoons, and, yes, cupcakes, became acceptable indulgences for North American adults. “Cupcake fanatics were part and parcel of the kitschy, hipster nostalgic boom of late nineties and late aughts,” he said. “Nightclub parties with piñatas, pin the tail on the donkey, and cupcakes. Like a lot of things, it quickly became the norm. It went from a showy token of ‘look how young and free spirited I am’ to just part of the landscape. A cupcake is an instant passport to childlike pleasure, and it’s simple. It’s such a gateway drug. You can be a buttoned-up, uptight red-hot pig and order a green tea cupcake and seem instantly more whimsical.” Practically, cupcakes also just make sense to eat. “It’s just good. It’s a personal cake! What could be wrong with that? You can peel back the layers of irony, but for a ten-year-old it’s just cake.”

  It goes even deeper according to Dr. Jean Retzinger, a former baker who teaches media studies at the University of California at Berkeley and believes that cupcakes took off for a number of practical reasons as a cultural food trend. Cupcakes were a familiar food, easily recognizable to any American, unlike, say, French macarons (which required explanation and translation). They were accessible, so even if your city didn’t have a cupcake b
akery, you could find the ingredients to make them at any supermarket, and they were an individual luxury, which allowed a sort of guilt-free (or low-guilt) indulgence. More than anything, they were an easily adaptable symbol of whatever you wanted them to be. “Food represents so much more than calories consumed,” said Retzinger. “I suspect the cupcake becomes an emblem of those characters on Sex and the City. If you identify with those characters and lifestyle, the cupcake is your road into it.” One of the show’s key messages, Retzinger believes, was that you could purchase your feminist independence and your power in the world as a woman. Cupcakes were a gendered treat. An edible, easily obtainable icon of modern womanhood that was also affordable, unlike a seven hundred–dollar pair of shoes.

  Peter Naccarato, an English professor at Marymount Manhattan College in New York and author of the book Culinary Capital, agrees. “Sex and the City brought cupcakes to a whole new level,” he said. What Sex and the City did for cupcakes was move them from a local culinary phenomenon, which mattered mostly to New York food fanatics, to a national media-driven trend, heavily invested in the popular culture, fashion, and status that the show was associated with. The show was the tastemaker, blessing the food with its social capital. It became cool to eat a cupcake, unlike, say, a chocolate chip cookie or a brownie, neither of which were nearly as sexy anymore. If you served cupcakes at your office party or wedding instead of sliced cake, it showed a certain sense of class and sophistication, like following the right band. “The cupcake is a brilliantly exploited opportunity to take a small, local phenomenon and blow it up into a national phenomenon,” said Naccarato. “That’s what the media can do.”