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

Pumpkin spice latte cupcakes

Condensed nonfat milk, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, annatto (a coloring agent), natural and artificial flavor, caramel color, salt, potassium sorbate (a preservative).

Brewed fresh with the blood of angry vegans. source

Didn’t recognize those ingredients? Not surprised. Those are the mysterious components of a pumpkin spice syrup sold by Starbucks, the maker of the legendary Pumpkin Spice Latte. Who knows what spices and synthetic chemicals and cocaine extracts fall under the category of “natural and artificial flavors”? What could possibly explain the lack of pumpkin and the presence of “annatto”, an inexpensive, saffron-esque food coloring agent derived from the seeds of the annatto tree, not to mention the enigmatic “caramel color” found on so many food labels?

Well, the question of pumpkin’s absence is an easy one. Anyone who has tried plain pumpkin puree—whether fresh or canned—will know that unaccompanied, the stuff is fucking nasty. It begs to be roasted with olive oil and rosemary, at the very least, or perhaps stirred into a curry. But pumpkins true claim to fame can be found around Thanksgiving and Christmas, when grandmothers and teenage rebels everywhere hit the kitchens to whip up their goddamn definitive pumpkin pie recipes, either dumped from a can into a Pillsbury crust or cooked slowly, from scratch, with the tender care of a pastry chef. Despite pumpkin’s reputation as a pie stable, there is literally no natural sweetness present in the fruit—two measly grams of sugar per cup—so one must dump gallons of sugar into the pie along with butter and eggs and other such things in order for the dessert to be even remotely palatable.