Sweet little goodies
Remember the exquisite joy of clasping a pretty little cupcake in your hand? Five years old and frocked up to the nines at your best friend’s birthday?
The excitement of it, the absolute excitement of perfectly iced treats handed down to you by a smiling woman in a pretty frock – girlhood heaven!
Well, the cupcake has rapidly moved from the preschool theme party to become the new must-have treat. Everybody’s doing them, but none so well as New Yorker Rachel Kramer Bussel. www.cupcakestakethecake.com, Ms Bussel’s website, was established to satisfy the demands of all but the most demented of cupcake fiends.
Rachel Kramer Bussel also set up the blog as a way to get noticed at parties. Working as a senior editor for Penthouse magazine (now there’s a job description for a woman), she felt the need to balance her interests. Posing as a domestic goddess – “I run a cupcake website”; “Really!” – seemed a neat way to amp up her ‘hot factor’ at parties.
And Ms Bussel knew what she was doing – baking is crackerjack hot right now, the whole hearth and home thing more attractive by the minute as the world gets more uncertain, baking the very apex of homeliness. Hot, hot, hot!
Meanwhile a gaggle of pencil-thin, shabby chic prima kitchen ballerinas all over greater New York are busy swapping the perfect Vienna icing recipes, while others in that great metropolis deliberate over the perfect way to knock up a tower of those Sassy Sweet Velvet numbers they saw at the famed Sugar Sweet Sunshine bakery on NY’s Lower East Side (www.sugarsweetsunshine.com).
Still not convinced the humble cupcake has almost completed its ascent to the epicurean elite? Leading papers in the Big Apple sprout headlines heralding the latest hot treats: ‘Cupcakes get class’, ‘Cupcakes - the new generation’ and ‘The winner is… cupcakes!’
Not surprisingly in a city that loves a good home bake, this ‘bite-sized obsession’ has already made it to our shores. Nadene Weaver of Perth’s own Little Miss Cupcake has a rich array of flavours for you to sink your teeth into, baking her mother’s old faithful recipe from her Kalamunda home.
In 18 months the business has expanded so much she now employs her daughter and niece. The girls operate a beautiful stand at the Kalamunda markets on the first of every month. Under a calico tent decorated with floral patchwork flags you can view their towers of cupcakes.
Nadene begins baking at 3am each market day, operating two blenders and ovens simultaneously in a constant flow to cater for the ever-increasing demand, churning out as many as 1400 cupcakes in a day. The business can also create exquisite cupcakes for special occasions.
Little Miss Cupcake
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