Consider the Cupcake
St. Charles Avenue Magazine Food Column, March, 2005
By Michael Depp

Perhaps it began for you at a birthday party. Or a Valentine’s Day respite in second grade sometime after lunch and before dismissal on some cold and otherwise thankless February afternoon. “All right, put your books away for a few minutes,” the teacher said to everyone’s delight as she began the dispensation of chalky candy hearts; Disney-decorated, perforated, one-sided Valentines; cupcakes.

Unlike cakes and pies, which when sliced betray favorites and inequalities and provoke primal insecurities (“Why is her piece bigger than mine?”), the cupcake – and perhaps this one was crowned with a sugar-pink tuft of buttery icing and a dash of red sprinkles – was yours and yours alone. It was for you to savor first the shallow ring of frosting that remained on the wrapping when you peeled it off, then the first moist bite of all of your favorite flavors at once, sweetness heaped upon sweetness in incalculable volume overcoming your eight-year-old palate with atomic force.

Adults, now, I offer you a sweet assurance: Whatever your woes, cupcakes can still save you.

You dig into something deep and essential within yourself with each bite of a cupcake. There is a kind of perfect karma contained within it – the ability to take into your mouth at once equal parts of cake and frosting and to maintain this balance for the entire experience, such is the cupcake’s perfect architecture. (Who would ever eat a cupcake from bottom to top? Or vice versa? Doing so seems a sign of mildly dangerous imbalance…). The cupcake is discrete, self-contained and most important, as anyone’s inner child will exclaim with joy, yours.

This is something I had forgotten until this past summer. After all, how long had it been since I had a cupcake? Was I nine? A teenager, when the joys of a cupcake would’ve been too juvenile or too feminine a pleasure to embrace? (Real men, after all, do not eat cupcakes.)

But there I was walking down Denman Street in Vancouver this past July when I saw it – an unassuming little pink storefront with a single word on its sign in tight script like a pursed, lipsticky kiss – “Cupcake.” I had heard of the Cupcake Café in Midtown Manhattan, but had never gone out of my way to go there – what kind of admission would that be? But right in front of me, it was too easy to devolve into some much younger incarnation of myself. I went in, dropped $4 on two cupcakes, and returned there during each day of my trip.

Something about eating a cupcake now, as an adult, reminds me of a scene in the recent movie “I Heart Huckabees” when two characters repeatedly hit each other in the face with a large, inflatable ball. Something in the immediacy of the hit stuns them into a pre-cognitive bliss, and for one moment they are in thoughtless, pure, existential being. Sort of like eating a cupcake.

I thought of this again when cupcakes were the centerpiece dessert at a party given by a friend of mine, Shawn Whalen, a chef at Martin Wine Cellar, and his wife Courtney. The cupcakes this time around were red velvet, and in between greedy mouthfuls, we had a lengthy conversation on the numerous intrinsic values of the cupcake and all of the wonderful feelings it bestows on its eater. Since Shawn is much, much tougher than me (he drives a throaty Ford truck, does his own wiring, goes fishing – none of which my precious self would deign to participate in), I took this as a validation: It’s OK to enthuse about cupcakes. It’s OK to eat them in front of people other than your spouse or your closest friends.

Shawn and I took brief stock of the local cupcake landscape and found it wanting. Supermarket-made cupcakes are impersonal, underflavored. Packaged cupcakes – Hostess and their ilk – taste of shellac-y preservatives, and they sweat with saturated fat. These are cynical excuses for cupcakes; they prey on our primal urges and reward us with industrial substitutes for what we really crave.

So I’m throwing down the gauntlet – to Shawn, to Courtney (to my wife, for that matter, who pledges to join them in business) or to anyone who wants to fill a gaping void many people here didn’t know we had. The time has come for this city to have a cupcake-only bakery. If we can have a restaurant where people eat their meals in bed (strangely, this truly is a proposal under consideration for an old Magazine Street theater) than surely this is a trifle. All you need is a little storefront, a lot of sugar and flour, a singular ambition (Don’t get distracted. Don’t start thinking, “Now what if I tried making muffins, too?”) and an intuitive understanding of what a cupcake really means to its eater – a return to our first and fleeting sense of dominion, capped with sugar icing.

Until that day comes, I thought I’d console you with a cupcake recipe from Shawn and Courtney, who reportedly, along with my wife, are considering my proposal.

Coconut-almond joy cupcakes

Prep: 20 min.; Bake: 45 min.; Cool: 10 min. Makes 16 servings.

• 2 cups all-purpose or 2 11/4 cups cake flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 3/4 cup water
• 3/4 cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 large eggs
• 4 ounces unsweetened, high-quality baking chocolate

Heat over to 350 degrees. Grease bottom and sides of cupcake tins.

Beat all ingredients with electric mixer on slow speed for 30 seconds, scraping bowl constantly. Beat on high speed for three minutes, scraping bowl occasionally. Pour into pan(s).

3. Bake 15-20 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Gently tip over on to oven rack.

Coconut cream and almond frosting

Prep: 10 min. Makes 16 servings, about 2 1/2 cups.

• 1 package (8 oz.) Philadelphia cream cheese
• 2 teaspoons milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 1 cup toasted coconut
• Toasted slivered almonds to garnish

Beat cream cheese, butter and milk in a medium bowl with electric mixer until smooth. Gradually beat in powdered sugar one cup at a time until smooth. Fold in toasted coconuts. Spread on cupcakes and top with silvered almonds.