The Next Baked Sensation

We’ve weathered Cronut dominance, seen the cake-pop bubble burst and dallied with the kouign-amann, but what, asks Larissa Dubecki, is the next big thing?

- Larissa Dubecki

It began, as so many things do, in New York City, home of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and a humble bakery in West Village that was to change the course of culinary history. It was here, on the corner of Bleecker and West 11th, in the year 2000, when that high-water mark of early noughties culture, Sex and the City, parked its fictional character Carrie Bradshaw outside Magnolia Bakery for an epoch-defining scene of cupcake consumption. (And what kind of cupcake was it? History relates it was a vanilla cupcake – naturally – that sparked scenes reminiscent of The Beatles visiting the same city 36 years earlier.)

It’s tempting to suspect that, like then serving President Bill Clinton, actress Sarah Jessica Parker didn’t inhale, and that it was her stunt double consuming all those calories, but the result was the same. In the watershed year of the new millennium, the world hailed the first celebrity baked good.