Things that might not work out: cupcakes

I found out today that some cinemas now have a price tariff for ‘unwaged’ as well as OAP, student and other concessions. The concession being that joblessness is as certain as growing old or learning to read. It also begs the question of whether queues of full-time mothers and their subsequent outrage at being banded as an office dodger, benefit jockey or recent graduate will battle it out in the aisles over popcorn and nachos. And makes me think about all the people who’ve been slung out of the office in the big world money problem and sought refuge in quasi-domestic industries such as the designer cupcake bubble.

Baking and eating cake is one thing. Selling it and pretending that it’s ‘art’ or much better than investment banking is interesting. And the fear of grown people moving away from childhood playtime in the kitchen with mother because the prospect of failure is all too real is probably a pathology with a name.

Cake is the window dressing for big misogynists who jam them into windows, juxtapose them with stupidly expensive products to somehow make the object fetish a homely experience that you could rack up in your own oven to sell more high heels. But the uber-mensch of evil has to be the cupcake. The crude, coloured symbol of a world where no one works anymore, even if they wanted to. And a symbol that – despite being saturated in fat, evil and pointlessness – is bizarrely popular and a lucrative product.

In tandem with the global economic meltdown, the cake has sprung up like an floury atomic mushroom as the salvation to afternoon sugar dives, recently redundant city workers and dentists who wondered where the quality cavities were going to come from if everyone started taking on public health messages on board. Bakeries carve a profit margin from customizing their goods by making them different colours. Or different sizes. Or flavours. Some decide to make them macho.

The so-called resurgence of the cupcake in pop culture is pinned on Sarah Jessica Parker’s malnourished character wolfing one on the steps of a NY bakery. It has been said, completely unreasonably, that the cupcake is a selfish cake which chimes with a culture of self-preservation at all costs and explains why a single woman in her 30sis seen eating one in the first place. But there’s little point in analyzing why a woman eating a cake by herself and not portioning it out into birdlike pieces to share with her hatstand friends is equivalent to sitting on a big box shouting: IT’S MINE, ALL MINE AND YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY. I SPIT ON EMPATHY AND WOULD STRANGLE UNBORN CHILDREN IF I COULD. A fictional character who exists to avoid meaningful sexual relationships, deify a daddy-figure and write sentences on a laptop that can later be used as solipsistic groin-searching soliloquy is entertainment of the point-laugh-pity variety, not a baked good endorsement.

Where it’s come from is best left to spurious home-economics analysis. The cupcake market, however, reveals endemic social problems that should have been left on a doily but have somehow crept into the mass market. They’re basically fairy cakes which have infected the world with their abundant, undercooked, smelling-slightly-of-raw-egg presence in fetes, church halls and anywhere where you have to bring and buy. They should be brilliant because simplicity is good. Anyone can make them. Everyone does. And when bourgeouise social duty calls upon young and old to make a culinary contribution, invariably, they’re shit.