H
ere’s some breaking news — the cupcake is dead. Well, it is in New York anyway.
Crumbs Bake Shop, one of the heavy hitters in the Gotham gourmet cupcake business, has seen the value of its shares plunge 34 percent last month to an all time-low. At one time it fetched $13 a share; now you can pick one up for $1:70.
I can’t say I’m astonished. The cupcake craze had ‘passing fad a la Hula Hoop’ written all over it from the time the first shops opened back in the early years of the millennium. Imagine: a phenomenon that owed its existence to a single episode of the TV soap opera Sex and the City which happened to feature a cupcake shop. Talk about a flimsy foundation.
For the discerning observer cupcakes were always a mere flash in the baking pan. They never grew the commercial legs of, say, doughnuts.
The doughnut. Now THERE is a gustatory delectation you can take to the bank. Not only is the humble doughnut hale and hearty, it’s spawning new and exotic offspring faster than a Kardashian collects grooms. The cupcake craze may be cratering in New York, but doughnut hybrids are rising in the ashes.
A Lower East Side enterprise called Doughnut Plant (motto: We Doan Need No Steenkin Sex and the City) — is doing turn-away business offering items such as a number crested with roasted chestnuts and creme brûlée.
They fly off the shelves as fast as they can bake them.
Meanwhile in Washington there’s a joint called Zeke’s DC Donutz which offers a blitz of blintzes that you’d never find at Tim Hortons. Exhibit A: a peanut-butter frosted doughnut topped with a slice of undercooked bacon.
Which is tame stuff compared to what’s on the menu at Glam Doll Donuts of Minneapolis.
At Glam Doll, Goth-clad servers with stainless steel implants in locations you don’t want to know about dish up pricey sliders with names like Femme Fatale, Bombshell and Chart Topper, which is described as an “unexpectedly perfect topping blend of peanut butter and sriracha...”
Sriracha? Sounds like a skin disease.
Clearly there are some major mutations going on in the world of baked buns. Take McDonald’s. The world-famous franchise is rolling out a new version of it’s Egg McMuffin that is, um, egg-free. Well, yolk-free anyway. It still features a whole-grain muffin, Canadian bacon and white cheese, but the rest is only egg whites, which means the all new ‘Egg White Delight’ contains about 50 fewer calories than the regular Egg McMuffin.
You don’t have to order the new version by the way; the always popular, belly-busting Egg McMuffin is still on the menu.
But the most disheartening news on the snack front has to come from Wonton Foods, a New York company that happens to manufacture most of the fortune cookies in the world.
And Wonton Food, alas, has been bitten by the Political Correctness bug.
It seems the company has been receiving complaints from consumers about the ‘romantic messages’ found in their fortune cookies.
You know — messages like ‘One who admires you greatly is hidden before your eyes’?
Well, some consumers (clearly people without actual lives) have deemed such messages ‘offensive’ and ‘sexist’. Wonton Food is bowing to the public pressure and replacing such sentiments with treacly, Happy Face pronouncements like “You make every day special”.
Gag me with a wonton soup spoon.