Cupcakes are latest get rich quick scheme

By Veronique Dupont, in New York for AFP Published: 10:00AM GMT twenty-two February 2010

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Say it with cupcakes... a worldwide retailing phenomenon. Photo: Leila Cutler / Alamy

A normal dessert in America, the cupcake is zero new, but in new years it has morphed in to a must-have epicurean treat, popularised in piece when a brave woman on the trend-setting radio array Sex and the City ate one in an part shown in 2000.

This calorie-laden dessert, customarily colorfully decorated, has taken the United States by charge by specialised cupcake sell chains, similar to Magnolia Bakery and Crumbs, and outlets such as chocolate tradesman Godiva and the Cinnabon cinnamon bun sequence that are cashing in on the boom.

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Cupcakes are gathering up with augmenting magnitude at the sell level, too, as entrepreneurs open shops and online stores.

In New York there are even cupcake trucks snaking by the city"s streets, to one side those offered Greek sandwiches and alternative goodies.

The New York Times spoken in a new essay that the abounding cake, customarily coated with frosting, is the "latest entrepreneurial fantasy".

The Wall Street Journal not prolonged ago dedicated an complete page to the phenomenon.

Blogs are multiplying - cupcakeblog.com and cupcakestakethecake.com between them - as people go online to plead the one preferred iterations, such as Red Velvet (a reddish chocolate cake), Fluffer Nutter (vanilla baked sweat bread with peanut butter and marshmallow frosting) and Peppermint Everything (frosting brimful with peppermint candies, marshmallows lonesome in chocolate sprinkles and wafers).

Cupcakes even have their own being radio show, "Cupcake Wars," in that bakers array cupcake contra cupcake to win a prize.

The cupcake disturb is unconditional Europe, generally in France, where the small candy are gnawing at the heels of the normal macaroon, and is swelling in to the Middle East.

Magnolia Bakery, a colonize of the direction whose emporium in Manhattan"s Greenwich Village is well known for the prolonged queues, right away has 4 stores, together with one in Dubai.

The bakery has even desirous career switches. Fadi Jaber, a Saudi of Palestinian origin, gave up a career at Unilever to open Sugar Daddy, a sequence of cupcake stores in the Middle East, after tasting one at Magnolia"s.

Rachel Thebault quiescent from an investment bank to follow her culinary mental condition and non-stop in 2007 Tribeca Treats, a bakery that creates a gorgeous accumulation of cupcakes as commercial operation watch.

But foe has turn fierce, she said, and so her emporium branched out in to offered gifts and alternative sorts of cakes and cookies.

Kim, a healing workman in Washington who did not wish to give her last name, began offered cupcakes a year ago "to have a small additional income to compensate my 3 kids" college tuition".

"People have been funny about the cupcakes," pronounced Kim, who is you do the commercial operation on the side and for right away does not brave renounce from her unchanging job.

But for Kim, who earns a large distinction of 1.75 dollars on each cupcake sole at 2.50 dollars, foe is not a problem.

"The direct is clever even though there are a lot of cupcake places opening up".

And Kim suspects the mercantile downturn has something to do with her own great fortune: "Because the economy is so bad, so people infrequently wish to provide themselves rather than shopping a total cake."