It has been a long time coming. As part of its tireless efforts to tell us what fashions are going up and what are going down, The Sunday Times’ Style magazine last weekend belatedly? led the anti-cupcake backlash.
A feature-length article written by one Laura Atkinson a journalist with impeccable bakery trend-spotting credentials (her 9-to-5 job is news editor for that estimable sociological journal Heat magazine) declared "Now the backlash has started".
The evidence? One new anti-cupcake blog in the US, the food blogger Sophie Jordan whose anti-cupcake tirade Stop the Week mentioned in September last year, and a "cupcakes are over" quote from Ravinder Bhogal, whose own publishing web page describes her as a "beauty journalist with a passion for good food". Plus some catty observations based on "a recent visit to one of the many cupcake bakeries".
"There’s something unsettling at the heart of cupcake culture," declares Atkinson, citing "women in their 30s, cooing over the cutesy, calorie-jammed treats as if they were newborn babies".
It is an inspiring critique done on the back of a Hummingbird Bakery receipt though it may be that unearths anyone who is mortally offended by a confectionery format, and for this, Laura should be applauded.
Alas, the future looks bleak for the cupcake dodgers. Last week CNN posted a story headed, "Can we please stop calling the nation’s love affair with cupcakes a trend?", suggesting it’s now firmly established in the mainstream in the US.
Sales of cupcakes were up by over 40% in the UK last year and, from 13-19 September, British Baker will be celebrating National Cupcake Week again and with increased relish, knowing now that it winds some people up.
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