The Tastemakers by David Sax Read Free Book Online Page A

before, the nearest business to us, a hair salon, had transformed into a cupcake bakery called Le Dolci. On our first night in the house a friend brought us a box of their cupcakes in flavors like s’mores and key lime. The icing took up half the weight of the cupcake, and the designs were overly elaborate—one had chocolate cake, embedded chocolate icing, another layer of icing frosting the cake, itself covered in chocolate sauce swirls, topped off with a chunk of brownie as though it was created for some chocolate industry–sponsored bake sale. It wasn’t a cupcake, that delicious, sinful treat of my youth, but rather a Cupcake, the very evocation of this global trend that had turned baked goods into an arms race of cuteness, sacrificing the subtlety of taste for an onslaught of gimmickry and sugar, the boy band of desserts. When I heard a few months later that a cupcake martini bar was opening in Toronto, with sweet alcoholic drinks garnished with your choice of minicupcakes, I prayed for the rapture to arrive and drown this wretched trend in a cleansing lake of fire.
    Perhaps it will come to pass. On April 17, 2013, as I sat in Georgetown Cupcake eating a cherry blossom specimen (vanilla with real cherries, and a glob of cream cheese–cherry icing), having just come from the nearby Sprinkles, where I tried a selection of minis and nearly broke my tooth on their trademarked fondant dots, my brother e-mailed me an article that the
Wall Street Journal
had just posted, titled, “Forget Gold, the Gourmet Cupcake Market Is Crashing.” Crumbs had posted significant earnings downgrades for fiscal year 2012, and their stock plunged 34 percent in one day, down to $1.70 from a high of $13 a share in 2011. The chain would scale back its aggressive expansion plans, and other cupcakebakeries were quoted as saying that sales were declining. That night in DC I went to my friend Gail’s house for dinner, and her son Zachary, who had just turned six that day, asked to be excused from the table to go play with his new Lego set. “Okay, Zachary, you can still have a cupcake for dessert,” my friend offered, and Zachary, to our collective shock, said he didn’t want one. A six-year-old was tired of cupcakes. Surely this was the cupcake’s death knell.
    Not so, said the cupcakers, including Alison Robicelli, owner of an eponymous bakery known for its cupcakes. In a swift and damning blog post responding to the Crumbs news, she carefully dissected and refuted the cupcake Cassandras’s arguments with in-depth economic and social commentary. “Know why cupcakes aren’t going anywhere?” Robicelli wrote. “Because you need something to be ‘the next cupcake’ just like you need something to be ‘the new black.’ It’s not a bubble; it’s a genre—individually portioned dessert. You can talk about feminism, and
Sex and the City
, and nostalgia all you want; it comes down to the fact that just about everyone on earth likes cake. Not rocket science.”
    Steve Abrams at Magnolia echoed those sentiments when I’d asked him about the trend’s limits. “You have a food media that’s all fucking pissed off that they haven’t killed the cupcake,” he said. “By the time I bought this business it was no longer a craze in my mind,” said Abrams, noting that Magnolia’s business is evenly split between cupcakes and their other baked goods. “In a hundred years from now there’ll still be a brownie troop that needs a fund-raiser, and they won’t be baking macarons … or fondue.”
    Eventually cupcake fever will break. Some cupcakeries and overextended chains will close or shrink, but their legacy will continue on in commerce and culture. Cupcakes arguably created what has been called the “single-focus premium-indulgence” retail market, a mouthful of industry jargon that basically means small