the magnolia bakery

Miss Eliza’s cakes, made without the benefit of raising agent, were probably more akin to cup-sized rocks than the airy creations we drool over today. The US Hostess brand lays claim to having produced the first mass-produced cupcake-style product in 1919 – by today’s standards a very dull bake indeed, comprising simple devil’s food cake with not a hint of filling or icing.  Ironically, given the cupcake-baking mania that would later sweep American homes, advertisements for these treats boasted: “Now baking at home is needless.” Cupcakes didn’t evolve into the objects of desire we know today until 1950.

New York's Magnolia Bakery kicked off cupcake mania

New York City’s Magnolia Bakery, the acknowledged crucible of the cupcake boom, opened in 1996, selling prettily decorated cupcakes from its iconic nostalgia-themed store in Greenwich Village. A couple of years later Carrie Bradshaw took a bite of one an episode of the phenomenally popular TV series Sex and the City –in the process setting the world on its frosting feeding frenzy.

The phenomenon was not to be confined to the US. In 2000, Nigella Lawson persuaded the British public of the virtues of cupcakes over the more perfunctory English fairy cake. Her retro-chic spin on cupcakes, sprinkled with dolly mix and other classic childhood treats, tapped into a vein of nostalgia for a sweeter, simpler era (although arguably one that never existed).  Nigella encouraged women to bake cupcakes not because it was their role in life to do so, but because they were entitled to reclaim some of the domestic sphere if they chose to. Cupcakes proliferated in UK homes and in dedicated bakeries.  The UK joined a cupcake bandwagon that seemed unstoppable.