September 23, 2006

• cakeeeee....
  
  my new obsession: gourmet cupcakes. last week teresa and i went to dylan's in midtown and scarfed down a beautiful buttery thing with a dreamy chocolate center, topped with a smothering of textured white happiness and a chunk of chocolate chip cookie. here's the article par excellance that got me started:

   

  

  Cupcake Nation

  BY JOEL STEIN

  Posted Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006

  
  There's nothing inherently wrong with the cupcake. Just like there's nothing inherently wrong in the Koran. But our society's twisting of the cupcake's role has become a sickness. They've paved the local bakery and put up a $3 cupcake store. Not only has the cupcake specialty boutique spread like a contagion to nearly every major city in the country, but nearly a dozen cupcake-recipe books have come out in the past two years, which is particularly amazing when you consider that, not counting dye, there are only about seven ingredients in a cupcake.

  Patient zero was Magnolia, a tiny, retro bakery in New York City's West Village, which, in 1996, had some extra batter and made a dozen cupcakes. Soon Magnolia had to institute a limit on cupcakes per customer. Then Sarah Jessica Parker, who lived nearby, put her local phenomenon on Sex and the City, leading tour buses to stop there. At the admittedly delicious Sprinkles in Los Angeles, which Oprah declared her favorite cupcake after getting a box from Barbra Streisand, the line on weekends is more than half an hour long. Which, yes, is longer than it takes to bake a cupcake.

  I totally get it. As a kid, my heart pumped in anticipation of a classmate's birthday and the inevitable arrival of that wide, low pink box. I'd pick away at the frosted top, then collect the remaining pure cake in both hands, eating out of my palms like a crazed bird on a sugar high. And when no one was looking, I'd shove the paper in my mouth and chew it like cupcake gum. Even now I like an occasional chai latte--flavored Sprinkles cupcake, just as I appreciate a great burger or mac and cheese. The problem is that in the yuppie-under-40 set, there are no other desserts. Just a constant weighing and comparing and blogging about the nation's cupcakeries, as if they were the Goldberg Variations.

  To my shock, Michelle Myers--who trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, runs the patisserie Boule in Los Angeles and makes some of the best canelés and Parisian macaroons in the U.S.--approves of cupcake mania. "It crossed our minds that we put a lot of expensive ingredients and skilled technique into making canelés, and they're the same price as cupcakes," she says of what artisanal bakeries have discovered is the most profitable dessert not made by Hostess. But Myers also loves being transported to her childhood via the American madeleine. She not only buys cupcakes but also bakes them on weekends for her little sister.

  Candace Nelson, who co-owns Sprinkles with her husband, opened a second Los Angeles location last week and plans to go national. "These are scary times. That's when people crave comfort food," says the former investment banker. "That's why I went into the cupcake business. I'm in this little cupcake bubble where everyone is smiling ear to ear."

  That's what bugs me about cupcakes: they're fake happiness, wrought in Wonka unfood colors. They appeal to the same unadventurous instincts that drive adults to read Harry Potter and watch Finding Nemo without a kid in the room. They're small and safe, and so people convince themselves that they can't have that many calories. They are the dessert of a civilization in decline. The worst part is, I want a cupcake right now but bad.
  
  
  
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  in other news, this is just gross:
  
  

  Bay Area Girl Carves Out a Niche for Herself with Cake Sculptures

  (PRWEB) November 30, 2005 -- Debbie Goard launches web site to promote the eating of dogs , bags and dead rats (uh, cake interpretations, that is). Mid November 2005 marked the long time coming launch of www.debbiedoescakes.net Debbie is an Oakland resident by way of North Carolina. She has a background in art, with nearly two decades of experience in cake design. Over the course of her career she has crafted a motley array of edible artworks. Most recently, she served a stint in a San Francisco bakery that specialized in x-rated cakes, but not limited to them. Catering to bachelorette parties, the work was interesting, to say the least, but Debbie really savored the opportunities to veer from the "adult" themes and satisfy her love of sculpture. Her designs have run the gamut from edible purses to the aforementioned dead rat cakes.Still,while she enjoyed her work she never really believed that cake design was her calling, always viewing it as a job and not a career. In fact, in 1998 she vowed to end her bakery days and risked it all to start her own handbag line called ChiChi handbags. The business was slow to take off and handbag design was becoming a glutted field. When a certain White House intern announced her own line, she knew it was time to get out. It wasn't until two years later that a move to California prompted her to return to cakes.The die was cast this time and she embraced her field.Cake sculpture gave her an opportunity to reconcile her love of art with her need for money. After countless instances where her cakes, often bearing no resemblance to "cake" were mistaken for "real" objects, most notably, the time a life size chihuahua cake compelled restaurant patrons to exclaim "Why is there a dog on the table?!" It was then that she realized that perhaps she had been denying her fate. Soon after, www.debbiedoescakes.net came to fruition. So, if you see a dog on a table, don't be alarmed -- he's probably just there for the dessert. ewwwwww...makes me kinda ashamed to be from the bay

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