There Will Be Cupcakes

Decades from now, your grandson will be pushing you around in a rusty shopping cart through the desolate, grey, overgrown streets of a wasteland once known as New York City, scavanging for more sand for the rudimentary water-filtration system he's set up back at the survivors' hovel. He'll pause before the shell of an abandoned building with a dusty, worn sign, that reads: "Butch Bakery."

"What was this place?" he'll whisper.

"Looks like an old cupcake plantation," you'll say. "Most of the folks around here made their living from cupcakes. For a time, they were very popular."

"Cupcakes? You mean those frosting mounds pictured in the book of O?"

"Yes. Oprah loved cupcakes. Everyone did. They'd pay $4.00 for just one. Pretty soon everyone was selling fancy cupcakes—some even with bacon."

"Dear O," your grandson will say, shaking his head. "No wonder the apocalypse came to pass."

The wheels of the old shopping cart will squeak as he pushes you past the old bakery, "Yeah," you'll respond, "We were basically asking for it."

From The Wall Street Journal:

When David Arrick thought about using skills gained at an elite Wall Street law firm to transition from one job sector to another, real estate development in Dubai was his next logical career choice. When that didn't pan out, it was cupcakes. Mancakes, to be exact…

Strolling around one day in the West Village, a neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, Arrick spied people lining up around the corner for Magnolia Bakery's cupcakes. This piqued his interest in the business.

And then, reading an article about cupcakes shortly after, he found himself disgusted when the writer called them "pink and magical."

"Why did cupcakes need to be magical? They're not magical for me. Where's the masculine aesthetic?" Arrick said. "We needed to butch it up, buttercup." And so Butch Bakery, an online delivery "masculine" cupcakery was born.

The bakery sells the usual fare, but with a twist. It offers flavors like kahlua-soaked vanilla cake with Bailey's Bavarian cream, brandy-soaked lemon cake with orange-infused chocolate ganache filling, and chocolate and beer-infused cake with beer buttercream. Not every cupcake is drenched in alcohol: Butch Bakery offers caramel cake with salted caramel filling; and maple cake with milk chocolate ganache and crumbled bacon.

Arrick is right: cupcakes don't need to be magical. But they don't need to be masculine either. The only thing they need to do is calm down.

So what do you get when you combine three of the worst trends of the 00's—fancy cupcakes, putting bacon in everything, and man-ification—into one business? A "butch cupcake" soaked with booze, garnished with bacon, and topped with a pile of frosting and a hard disc of chocolate painted to look like camouflage. Yum?

Also, you get success—which, good for Butch Bakery. If they can get people to pay $16 for four marketing gimmicks shaped like cupcakes, even though the infuriating cupcake trend is at least ten years old at this point, why shouldn't they?

And then there's this:

So who is buying rum-soaked lime cakes with mint white-chocolate ganache? Are men lining up to savor testosterone-infused baked goods?

Not exactly. Most of the orders have been placed by women, but as Arrick says, "We love the girls, we love the guys, we love the gays. We'll sell to anyone."

It's great that the reporter apparently asked, "Will you sell cupcakes to everyone, or just straight men who inexplicably refer to themselves as 'butch'?" Because discrimination is so prevalent in cupcakery. Maybe this will finally get Magnolia Bakery to reconsider their "We only sell to real-life steel magnolias" policy.