The art of frosting a cupcake

I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of sick of cupcakes.

There are plenty of Wall Street analyses of the gourmet cupcake business out there on the interwebs.  The details vary, but essence of the story seems to begin with Magnolia Bakery, the rise of gourmet cupcake businesses and chains across the country, and a mad dash for buttercream, followed by declining popularity over time as people start to realize that cupcakes, frankly, are rather overrated.

Some bitter little fuckers feel the need to bash cupcakes with their oh-so-sophisticated hipster sensibilities, but I won’t sink to that level. Now, I am not keen on those cutesy, overpriced buttercream megaliths either. There’s a good reason for that, and it’s not because my precious palate can’t stand a bit of sweetened butter. Mostly because I have shopping guilt. 

I feel like a fucking criminal spending two fifty on a latte, much less fivebucks for a small, crumbly cake covered in oily frosting. source

Cakes with whom I have philosophized

Have you ever arrived home after a long day at school, or work, or even an hour at the gym, and despaired at having all of the ingredients to make food, but no actual, palatable food?

Cans of condensed soup? Shelf-stable cheese? Better go find a Pinterest recipe. source

I imagine you have. Takeout to the rescue, y’all.

First take

It was about a year ago—a year ago this coming week, in fact—that I made my first cake. Solo. No mix. I don’t believe I had ever made a cake on my own, box or not, yet I was determined to do so despite my total reliance on my mother to even cream butter and sugar in the KitchenAid up to that point in time.

Oh, all the sweat and toil I could have been spared...source

The occasion: mom’s birthday. In exchange for providing my brother, myself, and my poor, pasta-making dad with sustenance day in and day out, I would make a single cake to celebrate the anniversary of when my mother busted out of her own mother’s nether regions. A suitably grand occasion for cake-making.