How to be domestic goodess

, in trying to make sense of it all, we have, inevitably, politicized a simple piece of cake. Not content to accept that they’re easy and cheap to make, glamorous and stylish to buy and appealingly proportioned in a diet-conscious world, social commentators have sought a deeper reasoning for the popularity of cupcakes.  Some have decried them as a symptom of a society no longer willing to share; the Guardian described them as “the favourite greedy treat of the me-generation”Academics at New York’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy have even posited that the location of cupcake bakeries might be a more accurate gauge of urban gentrification than more traditional socio-economic barometers like property prices. Interestingly, they had to abandon their field research when the number of New York cupcake outlets grew too numerous to properly assess.And where there’s a craze there’s a critic. Cupcakes have come under attack in recent years, a lot of it sneering in tone. In an essay in award-winning food journal Fire & Knives, academic Sarah Emily Duff questioned the vehemence of the anti-cupcake lobby and pointed to the Observer’s description of cupcakes as one of the ten worst food trends of the decade, up there with genetically modified food.
But Duff made the further point that some of the attacks stemmed from the fact that cupcakes were deliberately positioned in the marketplace as “girly” food.
“… I do feel that some of the anti-cupcake movement is informed by a dislike of things associated with women,” Duff said. “What concerns me is that we’re still associating children’s food with a particular kind of childlike femininity.”