The Tastemakers Read Free Page B

becoming the number-one priority.”
    Magnolia’s cupcakes steadily grew in popularity, first in the neighborhood and then around the rest of New York City. “It became a destination,” said Appel. “You’d walk down from the Upper East Side to the West Village for a cupcake, like you’d do with your favorite slice of pizza.” By 1997 Magnolia Bakery witnessed its first cupcake lineups forming outside the shop, and these soon snaked around the block. The shop instituted a hard limit of a dozen cupcakes per customer, which infuriated some but helped manage the incessant demand. These customers weren’t exclusively children and their parents; in fact, they were largely adults—single and married, older and professional—who wouldn’t come for a box of cupcakes but rather a singular, handheld indulgence that they had specifically traveled there to acquire. Each time the cupcakes ran out (eliciting groans from the people in the lineup, who watched them disappear from the window, one at a time), their currency rose in value. The harder they were to obtain, the more people wanted those cupcakes.
    Magnolia Bakery was increasingly generating small local press clippings, though the first articles about the bakery didn’t even mention the cupcakes. A few in-flight magazines flagged them as a destination for visitors to New York, but the first mention of their cupcakes in the
New York Times
only happened in early 1999, and it was very brief, just a few lines in a short story on the cupcake’s potential revival, and also included mention of the Cupcake Café and several others. Still, the bakery was popular enough with the right people (cultural tastemakers in the media, fashion, and arts) that Torey and Appel were offered a book deal in 1998 with Simon and Schuster. By the time
The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook
was published in the fall of 1999, with a sun-drenched photograph of two full-sized cakes on the cover (one chocolate, the other coconut), much had changed at the bakery.
    Appel and Torey’s relationship had strained under the pressure of the business and the rapid success that the nascent cupcake mania brought with it. They jostled in the hot, cramped kitchen and argued over expansion plans with the passion that only old friends who go into business together can do. Finally, it reached a point at which Appel could take no more, and in 1999 she sold her share of Magnolia Bakery to Torey. Soon after, Appel opened the Buttercup Bake Shop uptown, specializing in the colorful, comforting baked goods that she sold at Magnolia, with a strong portfolio of cupcakes. Their rivalry only fueled New York’s growing cupcake obsession, which was about to tip into a full-fledged national cultural food trend with a bite heard round the world.

    S ex and the City, Season III, Episode V “No Ifs, Ands, or Butts.” Air Date: July 9, 2000
.
    Miranda and Carrie are sitting on a bench outside the Magnolia Bakery. Miranda wears flats, blue slacks, and an oversized red trench coat that matches her hair and lipstick. Carrie wears a dark blazer, gray linen dress, a silk scarf, and knee-high wool socks with chunky heels. Miranda holds a cup of coffee to her lips, while Carrie unpeels a vanilla cupcake with vibrant pink frosting
.
    Carrie: I have a crush.
    Miranda: Yeah?
    Carrie: Yup.
    Miranda: Good. You haven’t had a real crush in a while.
    Not since Big.
    Carrie: Big wasn’t a crush. He was a crash.
    Camera cuts in tight on Carrie as she takes a large bite of the cupcake. Cut to a wide shot, where she licks crumbs and icing from sides of mouth
.
    Carrie: His name is Aiden, and I believe him to be very cute.
    End Scene
.
    When I finally watched the infamous “cupcake scene” from
Sex and the City
, I was astounded by a few things. First, it is incredibly, unthinkably short, just twenty seconds, or about 1/90th the length of the episode. I can barely get the wrapper off a