The Cupcake Cult—You Saw it Here First!
Recently trending on Digg was a posting on Emerald Street about how cupcakes have taken over as the preferred cake-based treat. Click on the following picture if you want to go to the actual posting; and don’t forget to use Ctrl+Click to open the site in a new Tab.
The posting narrative points out that cupcakes have become “ … the ubiquitous pick-me-up we turn to in time of celebration and gloom”.
According to the article in the Washington Post there were 669.4 million cupcakes sold in the USA for the 12 months from October 2010 to October 2011. This number is the number of cupcakes sold. It does not include cupcakes made and eaten at home or cupcakes made and given away.
But seriously, how does anyone really count how many cupcakes were sold in the USA at any point in time?
Well, at this point, I would just like to remind readers that you saw it here first. Back in April 2011 I posted an awesome article about how cupcakes were the new muffins (here). In that posting I also gave readers some extremely useful tips on how to differentiate between muffins and cupcakes—which is not an easy task for an amateur. Basically if the recipe includes blending in any kind of nut or vegetable, includes oil in place of butter, or water in place of milk, and then tells you to simply mix the dough a little until all the ingredients are wet then you are not making cupcakes; they are muffins.
Also, another excellent indicator is that you will not encounter icing on a muffin. Never! You might get some muffins with ‘frosting’ (like a carrot cake muffin) but no bona-fide muffins will be found that have hard-set icing on top.
While I am on the subject I should mention that my amazing niece (who sometimes comments here as Cert3) makes a very nice vanilla butterfly cupcake. Dammit. I could have taken a picture or two of them last weekend but at the time I didn’t realise I would be crafting up this post. Mind you, it is best not to be too close to the making area when she is putting the cream into the little divot before putting on the butterfly wings. She has this whizz-bang supa-dupa compressed-air cream gun thing and sometimes it sort of mis-fires due to trapped air or something. When this happens people in the near vicinity have been known to end up with a little cream on them or in their drink.
But now what I want to know is how come the posting at Emerald Street about cupcakes ‘trended’ and yet my well crafted and highly interesting posting didn’t. If only I could work out that little mystery. And they got 22 comments in just three days! On the one posting! If I get 22 comments in a year I think about having a party. Just checking my cupcake posting I note that I did not get a single comment . . . sob.
