A Cupcake Boutique of One’s Own
(or, Mrs. Woolf Said She Would End the Recession Herself)
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about the current economic recession; what has it got to do with a cupcake boutique of one’s own? I will try to explain. I sat down upon a kitchen stool and began to wonder what “cupcake” meant. A few remarks about classroom birthday parties; a few more about portability and waste management (one must ever hold forth against that most ludicrous of inventions, the plastic fork); some sexual witticisms, if possible, about the cupcake’s inferior cousin, the muffin, followed by a reference to the Brontes (might not the family’s pervasive ill health have resulted from a chronic lack of dietary fiber?), and one would have done.
But on second sight the word seemed not so simple. “Cupcake” could mean, to the foreigner or dolt, a cake literally baked in a coffee mug; one could mistake the term for a verb, speak of “cupcaking” an infant, football, or painted egg; one might think “cupcake” denotes a receptacle into which a full-sized cake might be placed and set on display.
And as I began to consider the term in this last sense, I soon saw that a full-sized cake, on its own, had one fatal drawback: I should never be able to hold it in my hand; should never be able to place a pure nugget of “cakeness” into a small paper bag, carry it home, and set it upon the mantel to admire and save for a private moment of indulgence.
I should never have been able to embroider “Cute as a Cupcake” on Leonard’s macintosh.
All I can do, then, is offer you an opinion upon the point: the contemporary economic crisis would be much improved, if not altogether eliminated, if every city, town, and village opened cupcake boutiques of their own. I will do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion. I will make use of a fiction to do so. (Oh, how lies will flow from my lips; I have never embroidered, for example; though were I to take up the stitching of pet phrases upon articles of clothing, Vita, not Leonard, would be the happy beneficiary of my labours).
Here then was I, in “the kitchen” a week or two ago, a fine October afternoon, lost in thought, my head bowed to my lap by the collar of the topic upon which you asked me to speak. To my right and left, confections of various kinds, white, golden, crimson. Some burnt, it seemed. In the further corner a mop wept in perpetual lamentation, its ropy hair strewn about its shoulders. There one might have set the oven timer for hours and sat lost in thought. Thought, you see—to call it by a prouder name than it deserves—had become cake batter placed into the oven. Then the gentle bubbling, the rising, the slow expansion into being, the constant checking with a toothpick, until—you know the sound—the ding of the kitchen timer; the sudden realization that an idea had baked completely; the insertion of one’s hands into oven mitts, the cautious pulling out of the tray, the careful laying of it out upon the limestone counter.
Alas—how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked. Just like a cupcake. With buckled paper and a warped peak resembling not the gentle curve of a woman’s mature breast but the still-nascent swell of an adolescent bud; the kind you don’t bother frosting but cast into the rubbish bin and hope, one day, you may pour something worth cooking and eating.
But, however small and distorted, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the still-hot oven of my mind, it became at once very exciting; and as I frosted, sprinkled (yes, sprinkled), and began to nibble delicately at the tip, using only the gentlest flick of my tongue and the lightest pressure of my foremost teeth, those actions set up such a tumult and aroma of ideas it was impossible to sit still. It was thus I found myself walking with extreme rapidity to find a bakery solely devoted to the production and sale of the cupcake.
For surely such a place existed; surely there was someone, somewhere, who had landed upon the idea which I—now audaciously trespassing across the neighbor’s lawn to reach the Oxbridge business district—was growing increasingly certain would be an environmentally sound way to stimulate the lagging economy: storefronts with gleaming silver trays bearing, not just chocolate and vanilla, but apple spice, Irish cream, coconut snowball, key lime. More still: pina colada (paper umbrellas for charm and colour), pink lemonade (straws, lemon wedges), pumpkin cream, cookies and cream, root beer float. Frosting swirled to double the height of each delicacy; the option to purchase small, medium, or large-sized cupcakes—surely consumers would swarm, buy in quantities, paying upwards of $5 a cupcake. Jobs would be created, landfills spared the clutter of cake-sized paper plates and plastic forks. The cupcake boutique! We are all going to heaven, the hole in the ozone is shrinking, and economic recovery is nigh.
It was in this frame of mind that I burst, breathless, into the nearest Starbucks; and there I saw, to my dismay, a homely trinity suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market: red velvet, double chocolate, vanilla bean. That was all. It was as if some one had let fall a shade. This was the state of the cupcake’s foray into the baked-goods market? The lamp in the spine, I thought, does not light on such fare. We are maybe going to heaven, we hope economic recovery is nigh—that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind the Starbucks offerings produced.
But why, I asked myself, coming out onto the darkening street, the October night calm, lovely, a star or two caught in the yellowing trees; why, I repeated, halting under a Barnes & Noble awning, which sagged under a brood of warbling pigeons; why has the proliferation of cupcake boutiques thus been stifled?
A hasty perusal of the cookbooks inside, and I concluded that it was because Martha Stewart, that most incandescent, unimpeded culinary mind, never had a brother. But let us suppose that she did have a brother, a young man gifted with gustatory alacrity and a keen mind for business; what might have been his contribution to the history of the cupcake?
Alas, we shall never know. While Martha was sent off to whisk bechamel at Le Cordon Bleu, her brother—let us call him Frank—remained at home. Frank, just as imaginative and industrious as his sister, made sandwiches and boiled cabbage. His parents kept him far away from ovens. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a man-who-would-bake-cupcakes and they loved their son. They hid his cookbooks and replaced them with novels. He would wander out early in the mornings, lured by the thick scent of baked bread; he would loiter in bakery doors, saying “were it me, I would fill this space with cupcakes.” The store managers laughed in his face. And—who shall measure the heat and violence of the cupcake entrepreneur’s heart when caught and tangled in a man’s body?—one cold December night, Frank killed himself. He was not, as you might think, buried at the cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop opposite the Elephant and Castle; he was cremated. (Poor Frank—is it any wonder he made this final request in his suicide note?)
But my belief is that this cupcake-baker-who-never-baked-a-cupcake still lives; he lives in you and me, and in many other would-be cupcake-makers who are not here tonight, for they are at home, burdened with the weight of the failing economy; but he lives, a continuing presence who only needs the opportunity to flourish among us. This opportunity is within our power to give him, for if every one of us will only support the opening of free-standing cupcake boutiques in our local communities; if every one of us, even those of us living in poverty and obscurity, will at the very least purchase a cupcake of our own, I believe Frank’s sacrifice will have been worth while.
Jamie Quatro’s first story collection, Ladies and Gentlemen of the 
Pavement, is forthcoming from Grove/Atlantic. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, McSweeney’s, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2011 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She holds graduate degrees from the College of William and Mary and Bennington College, and lives with her husband and children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.
