Why I hate cupcakes

 

14^th – 19^th of September is National Cupcake Week. While cherries only warrant one day (19^th July) cupcakes get a whole week. This places the Yank impostor on a culinary par with sandwiches (10^th – 16^th May). Sandwiches! Which loony organisation or shadowy governmental body charged with the task of allocating food birthdays decided that cupcakes should be elevated to the sovereign-like status of a week-long celebration?

 

If you are anything like me you will have found the slow and steady rise of the cupcake to the summit of Baked Goods Mountain incredibly irritating. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with cupcakes but for the love of God why are they so popular? Sadly I can’t imagine there will ever be a similar surge in the popularity of, say, ribs. So that’s no three-tiered wedding cake made of ribs, no knitted ribs and no giant rib served up to bemused tourists in Covent Garden. That’s a shame.

 

The cupcake is essentially just a fairy cake on steroids. Someone clever at the Telegraph compared the arrival of the cupcake in this country to that of the grey squirrel but I feel this does not sufficiently convey the extent to which fairy cakes have been sidelined. It’s cake genocide. Cupcakes make the grey squirrel look like a charmingly apologetic interloper.

 

We seem to have lost sight of the fact that both cupcakes and fairy cakes are primarily meant for children. There is nothing wrong with indulging in a nostalgic treat every now and then. I know people who still like the odd party ring or bowl of angel delight and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. What frustrates me is the way cupcakes have been so completely embraced by otherwise sensible adult women. Glitter, heart shaped sprinkles, pink frosting: this is the most infantilised baked good imaginable.

 

Sex and the City has a lot to answer for the cupcakes current status as a fashion accessory. Eating a cupcake will not make you more like Carrie. Move to New York, start dressing like Zandra Rhodes, become utterly self-absorbed: all this will help but eating cupcakes isn’t going to do it. Realistically how many of these Sex and the City-style cupcakes are actually digested by their fashionable consumers?

 

Cupcakes are too big, there is far too much icing on them and they have usurped the already perfectly fine fairy cake. Come the 14^th September I plan to make something that is the antithesis of a cupcake. Something simple and economical like a rock cake, a cake so ugly there is no mention of it on the British Baker Magazine website. This John Merrick of cakes deserves more recognition. I don’t expect the cupcake industry to fall over night but perhaps a National Rock Cake day in 2010 is an achievable goal.