Home

Side dish: A cupcake shop with "personality"

31.12.69

Get your lashes

Whipped Cupcakery ( igotwhipped.com ) joined the local cupcake scene last week. And with the catchphrase "Get whipped" and a focus on "personalities" instead of "standard flavors," it's clear owner Erin Smith has an idea of how to set herself apart.

Some personality options: Baby Bump (vanilla with a whole strawberry baked inside, and pink or blue vanilla butter cream), Hot Flash (espresso with cinnamon butter cream) and Not So Dumb Blond (banana with vanilla butter cream). And if you want a mixed dozen, well, Smith calls that "split or multiple personalities."

Naughtiness and obvious female-targeted branding aside, Smith, a media/marketing rep outside her baker's apron, says she's studied the cupcake trend and believes in its potential to take on the wedding-cake industry, for one. She grew up around a mother, aunt and grandmother who all made wedding cakes, but with cupcakes, she aims to twist the traditional. For example, rather than placing orange rind in a chocolate cupcake, her chocolate "vamp" features a blood orange butter cream frosting.

Source: Colorado Springs Independent

When my sibling rivalry got professional

31.12.69

My brother and I grew up in a household rich with meals: our mother’s hands reeked of garlic in an inside-the-veins way. Our lunches weren’t like our friends’. Every day we watched quizzically while they bit into soft bread filled with floppy disks of pink meat, garish mustard, waxy squares of cheese, then unpacked our own heavily seeded sesame semolina rolls dripping with oily roasted eggplant and smoked mozzarella. We sheepishly offered around crunchy fried chickpeas and hard olives, whose pits we’d suck on through class.

We became cooks without realizing it. My brother says it happened for him one night when my mother baked him brownies to mollify an especially heartbreaking moment in adolescence. He wrote me about them recently. They were “rich, dense with a double dose of chocolate in chips and batter; a single bite causing the following series of reactions: eyes widening, slight, blush-inducing moans beginning, a smile developing, finishing with the inevitable, ‘Oh my god.’” He is that dramatic about all food.

Source: Salon