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Let them eat cupcakes

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 17, 2009 - Cupcake?

Is that you?

Oh, we hardly recognized you. Look at how big you are! And that icing – that’s quite fancy. We see you everywhere these days – at hot little bars and bakeshops, sitting around all dressed up at weddings and fancy birthday parties. Seems like you’re doing well. Your parents must be proud.

Remember those old cupcakes? The small, straight-from-the-box ones, with the straight-from-the-can icing and the tooth-chipping sprinkles? Yeah, they seemed pretty good at the time, right?

But the round, tiny cakes that once made annual appearances at classroom celebrations and 3-year-olds’ birthdays have done a lot of growing up over the past several years. They’re bigger, more pure, filled and fluffed and iced and whatever else pastry chefs can dream up.

“It started with ‘Sex and the City’ and the Magnolia Bakery long, long ago,” says Tim Brennan, owner of Cravings Gourmet Desserts .

Soon, the trend spread to the West Coast, and eventually sweet talked its way across the rest of the country. Now, Brennan says, tour buses take groups to Bleecker Street in NYC, where they wait in line for one of Magnolia’s cupcakes. And they limit how many you can buy. “Only in New York,” he says.

But in St. Louis, the trend continues, with several businesses devoted to the cupcake. They include the new SweetArt in the Shaw neighborhood, and established places like Jilly’s Cupcake Bar on Delmar and The Cupcakery in the Central West End.

“It’s really growing,” says Stef Pollack, the St. Louis cupcake explorer behind the blog The Cupcake Project.

“It just seems like every time I turn around, there’s another cupcake shop. It’s everywhere.” Helen Lubeley-Murray has noticed too, and the co-owner of the historic Lubeley’s Bakery laughs when asked about the gourmet cupcake scene.

“These are all little trends,” she says. “A lot of these things start out in Los Angeles, and they kind of make their way down.”

But it’s not hard for her or Pollack or Brennan to understand why the trend’s so tasty.

Cupcakes are small and portable.

“You don’t have to buy a whole cake,” Lubeley says. And that means everyone can have something different.

“If you have 10 people in the room, they all want different things,” says Jill Segal, owner of Jilly’s. “A cake only allows you to have two flavors.”

And because they’re small(ish) there’s no need for sharing, says Reine Bayoc, owner of SweetArt.

But people are sharing -– with friends and families at parties, weddings, birthdays and showers. Looks like cupcakes are the new … um … cakes.

“At the Cakery, we have at least one cupcake wedding a weekend,” says Ericka Frank, owner of the Cakery and the Cupcakery.

Fillings are also a big trend, such as lemon curd or marshmallow butter cream at Jilly’s. And, as with coffee, the general gourmet-ization of the cupcake is on, Brennan says, with a focus on fresh ingredients and artisanal creations.

“I’m kind of surprised that it didn’t happen before,” Pollack says. “I mean, a cupcake is just a cake.”

Also as with coffee, though, you’ll pay for all that gourmet -– between $1.75 and $5.

But so far, Frank says, the cost hasn’t kept people away, despite the economy. “I don’t think the economy has impacted us as strongly as it has other businesses because we are still an affordable luxury,” she says.

And the glammed-up versions do share something with those old box cupcakes from the past; they’re meant to be memorable. Pollack, the cupcake blogger, regularly creates new treats for her lucky friends, like the Oreo cupcake with a built in chocolate shot glass of milk.

And that takes us back, again, to some old-school treats that have been promoted to the grown-ups’ table.

“We laugh,” Lubeley-Murray says, “because we’ve always had these things.”

Her family’s bakery first opened in St. Louis in 1937. They now sell gourmet cupcakes, too.