Have Cupcakes Lost Their Cool?

[Laura]

This article on Yahoo's Shine! section thinks the trend for (commercially-produced) cupcakes (and 6 other "food fads") may be nearing its end.
http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/food/cupcakes-and-6-other-food-trends-that-have-lost-their-cool-2143737/#photoViewer=1
Cupcakes and 6 other food trends that have lost their cool.
editor

by Sarah Fuss, Shine Staff, on Mon Jul 26, 2010 2:25pm PDT711
..Could the end of the cupcake trend be around the corner? Jacob Goldstein at NPR posed that question in response to a Wall Street Journal story that linked the popularity of cupcakes to growth in the New York City job market. Goldstein asserted that we are in a cupcake bubble: "'Did they really think cupcakes were different than cake?' the world will ask after the cupcake market implodes. 'Why did they wait in those ridiculous lines just to buy cake?'"

I was all smiles to find cupcakes at my own birthday this year, but the pretty treats did seem more functional--no cutting, less mess--than cool. How much more mileage do you think bakeries will get from these individually-sized treats?

Think it over while you flip through these recent food fads that are either gone or on their way out. If your favorite dish made the list, be strong. It doesn't mean you can't eat it anymore. It just means you might have to make it yourself.

Cupcakes
Will they continue to multiply or are they due for decline? On one hand, Magnolia Bakery, which started it all, opened a new location in Los Angeles just this month; on the other, I've noticed that users on Yahoo! Shine aren't as enamored of our cute cupcake stories as they used to be. What do you think?

[ChiCupcake]

Who determines what's in or what's out? Who determines the cool factor on anything from what we wear to what we drive? ME! I determine if I've had enough cupcakes & which store has the best or the coolest cupcakes.

NO! Cupcakes will never lose their cool because they're small, easy to transport, easy to hide and can be eaten before you go into the restaurant or church!! As long as there are mini cupcakes, they won't lose their cool factor.

We've been inundated with cupcakes from one end to the other and to some degree we have peaked. Temporarily, we might be in a valley, but we will come out of the valley and head back to the hills when someone does something outlandish or outstanding. But these little guys are here to stay. I think with all the cupcake stores out there, some will die a natural death, while others will thrive & survive. The cupcake stories are like your family, you're around them soooooooooooo much, you naturally tune them out. At some point, your ears will perk up when you hear something interesting being said.

Cupcakes mantra: we're here, we're fun, get used to it . . . LOL!

[Laura]

"What's cool" is usually decided by someone in marketing who sends out press releases (and in many cases free samples and other payola) to outlets of the media. I worked on a student newspaper when I was in college and you'd be surprised at the swag bestowed on even such a humble publication. The value and quantity of said swag increases proportionately to the influence and circulation of the publication targeted. This is pervasive throughout the media industry in the USA. :ohmy: (Interns for Vogue have the best wardrobes...)
Many bloggers and webmasters take advantage of this fact and manage snare the occasional gift card or free merchandise in the name of good PR. In all fairness, unlike some other publications, a good number of the bloggers to whom I link in the cupcake contests and giveaways thread do _disclose_ that they received from the company which produces it the merchandise they are reviewing, gift cards or vouchers they have received, and/or are giving away by random drawing. :blush:
While there are still little chi-chi places like magnolia bakery and others of that ilk making gourmet cupcakes, some with exotic ingredients, I'm increasingly seeing cupcakes in display cases in delis and suchlike here in NYC too. It's more likely that like the black-and-white cookie, the buttered roll and the bagel, nondescript non-fancy cupcakes will just become part of the convenience store food landscape. It's less likely that they will truly die out insofar as retail availability goes than that at least some of the "specialness" will wear off.

[Cup_Cakr]

OMG, CupCakes are sooo cool. They have not lost their cool over here!!

[Princess Cupcake]

There will always be a place for cupcakes. Maybe they won't always be hot enough to support bakeries dedicated solely to cupcakes, but I can't imagine ever going back to the days when cupcakes meant a cheap dry cake with a messy slathering of tasteless icing on top... with sprinkles if you were lucky. Today's consumers are going to demand better quality cupcakes tomorrow as well.

[partycupcake]

I think cupcakes being a fad is like saying cake is just a fad. Maybe brides will go back to traditional wedding cakes rather than cupcakes....but cupcakes will be baked forever. I haven't had a store bought one in years, but hostess is still selling good 'ole hostess cupcakes.

[Laura]

Though I can't reproduce the slideshow here, I can tell you that among the alternatives to cupcakes that were suggested thereon were Napoleons, crepes, and mini pies and pavlovas.
From Chicago Now:
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/life-style/2010/09/15-desserts-that-could-replace-the-trendy-cupcake.html
15 Desserts that Could Replace the Trendy Cupcake
Tracy Samantha Schmidt on 09.09.10 at 7:21 AM (Tracy Samantha Schmidt Editorial Director, ChicagoNow & Adjunct Faculty Member, DePaul University)

We love cupcakes, but why should we let them hog the stage when there are so many other amazing -- and often times tastier -- desserts out there? Well, it's about time that something else stomps the hugely trendy cupcake, and we have 15 tasty options lined up for you.
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/life-style/2010/09/15-desserts-that-could-replace-the-trendy-cupcake.html

[Laura]

from Eatocracy:
http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2010/09/20/55-magnolia-bakerys-bobbie-lloyd/?hpt=C2
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/09/20/t1larg.bobbie.lloyd.jpg
Magnolia Bakery's Bobbie Lloyd
5@5 is a daily, food-related list from chefs, writers, political pundits, musicians, actors, and all manner of opinionated people from around the globe.

No matter how you frost it, the cupcake craze is here to stay.

If anyone should know, it's Bobbie Lloyd: the self-proclaimed "Chief Baking Officer" of Magnolia Bakery, which received instant, international notoriety from the likes of Sex and the City and Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday" rap homage.

So why the sweet success? Lloyd shares her two sugar-coated cents.

Five Reasons Why Cupcakes Are More Than Just a Trend: Bobbie Lloyd

1. "Have you ever looked at a child's face when they experience that first sweet bite of a cupcake? Pure bliss."

2. "Cupcakes allow one to experience a small sweet pleasure (no major dessert commitment) that can transport you to another place for a moment."

3. "Cupcakes are just plain fun. They allow us to be silly for a moment and not take life so seriously."

4. "Cupcakes are easy to make. Anyone can become a cupcake 'expert' with a little practice and a lot of eating. You can seriously dress them up for a special occasion or keep it plain and simple."

5. "Cupcakes appeal to everyone. They are cross-generational and non-demographic. Mom, dad, grandma, grandpa and the kids, no matter what country they are from, can enjoy cupcakes."

Cupcakes: love 'em or loathe 'em? Tell us your opinion in the comments.

Is there someone you'd like to see in the hot seat? Let us know in the comments below and if we agree, we'll do our best to chase 'em down.

[Laura]

:huh:
from The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/dining/17pies.html?_r=1&ref=dining
Pie to Cupcake: Time’s Up
By JULIA MOSKIN
Published: November 16, 2010
San Francisco-
THE idea for a pie-centric restaurant came to Trevor Logan in the California desert. He was in the midst of planning an ice cream parlor when he had what may have been a flash of insight, a stroke of genius or a psychic message from his 90-year-old grandmother in Oklahoma: “Maybe I shouldn’t just be doing ice cream,” he thought. “We have The Pie.”

The Pie was the most popular dessert at his first restaurant here, Green Chile Kitchen. Now it has become the cornerstone of the menu at his second place, Chile Pies and Ice Cream, which he opened in March in the Western Addition district. Apples are layered with roasted green chilies, made savory with Cheddar cheese in the crust and sprinkled with a streusel topping of walnuts and brown sugar.

Green chilies and melted cheese are two basic elements of New Mexican cooking, said Mr. Logan, who went to college in Santa Fe and said that he opened Green Chile Kitchen to ensure that he had a steady supply of the food he missed after moving here.

Savory and sweet, earthy and spicy, Mr. Logan’s green-chili apple pie is an irresistible example of the lengths to which young pie makers are going to make their mark.

Pie had been lurking below the radar in recent years: taking cover during the ice cream trend, perhaps waiting to see which way the macaron tide would turn. (For proof that the cupcake craze has gone too far, consider the new turkey cranberry cupcake with gravy in the batter from Yummy Cupcakes in Los Angeles.)

Suddenly, New York and San Francisco are national centers of pie innovation. In Brooklyn, a pair of sisters from South Dakota are integrating sea salt and caramel into their apple pie and inventing aromatic fillings like cranberry-sage and pear-rosewater. In the East Village, at Momofuku Milk Bar, the pastry chef, Christina Tosi, has transferred the buttery, caramelized flavors of apple pie into a layer cake, with apple filling between the layers and crumbs of pie crust in the frosting.

Some of the experimentation has led to oddities including pie milkshakes, pies baked in canning jars and a monstrosity called the cherpumple: three pies (cherry, pumpkin, apple) baked inside three cake layers, all terrifyingly stacked together with cream cheese frosting. (Yes, it is a turducken for the dessert course.)

At Hill Country Chicken in the Flatiron neighborhood of New York, there are pies modeled on the flavors of cocktails and cookies and an extraordinary banana cream pie that improves upon the classic by adding Nilla wafers.

At the other end of the purity spectrum, Mission Pie in the Mission district here draws many of its employees from local youth advocacy groups, who learn about pie from the ground up. The all-pie cafe also sells organic flour that is grown at partner farms (such as the not-for-profit Pie Ranch), and makes delicious walnut pie — never pecan — to make use of the vast crop of local walnuts.

But amid the innovations, some truly useful discoveries in pie are coming from the trenches of pastry kitchens, made by professionals who bake all day, every day. These are changes not just in pie flavor and ideology, but in engineering.

To streamline operations in the pastry kitchen at Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the restaurant’s pastry chef, Avery Wittkamp, devised an enormous solution, which can be easily adopted by home cooks and Thanksgiving hosts. She bakes her rye pecan pie in a 10-inch springform pan, using a thicker, stretchable crust that can line the deep sides; it stays in place even when the pie is unmolded. Impressively, the tall bark-brown crust rises over a filling as wide, majestic and mahogany-brown as a redwood tree.

“It’s just as easy to make a big pie as a small one, and more efficient,” Ms. Wittkamp said.

She bakes this pie longer than usual to fully brown the crust, and gives it a higher crust-to-filling ratio than a traditional pie. She also deconstructs the traditional pecan pie filling into three strata: the custard, the chopped nuts and the whole nuts, each one delicious and distinct.

“The goal is to take the pie and elevate it without changing it,” Ms. Wittkamp said. Once a food editor at Martha Stewart Living magazine, she now works 12-hour days at the restaurant, starting between 5 and 6 a.m. “Making food for people is totally different from making it for photo shoots,” she said. “I wanted to feed a community.”

Pie seems to bring out the sentimental side of bakers. For Esa Yonn-Brown, the touchstone is her mother’s recipe for crust, so lumpy with butter that it would never pass inspection in a professional kitchen. At her Butter Love Bakeshop in San Francisco, it is baked to a gnarled, delicious brown with an almost bitter edge.

The pie Ms. Yonn-Brown has staked her reputation on is called Butter Pie. With its caramelized filling of butter and brown sugar, it belongs to the same gooey tradition as sugar pie, chess pie, shoofly pie and, in recent years, Ms. Tosi’s Crack Pie.

Butter Pie is the signature product of her shop, which is a bake shop in the same sense that Amazon is a bookshop: it functions online and via delivery only.

Pie has also proved its mettle by being neatly adaptable to the local-seasonal ideology of many modern kitchens. (Pumpkins, the Thanksgiving classic, are among the last vegetables to be harvested in the autumn.)

“Our grandmother didn’t make pumpkin pie in July or cherry pie in December,” said Emily Elsen, who opened Four and Twenty Blackbirds, a pie shop in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, with her sister Melissa in April.

The women grew up working in their mother’s restaurant in Hecla, S.D., where about 400 people lived at the time.


A version of this article appeared in print on November 17, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.