Cupcakes have come a long wayliterally. Bakeries nationwide now want to ship
you a fresh batch by overnight mail. The promise? Perfectly pretty and delicious
cupcakes, with icing intact, for an equally pretty price.
It’s the latest advancement in the cupcake-industrial complex, which has been
expanding ever since Sarah Jessica Parker famously bit into a pink cupcake at
the Magnolia Bakery in “Sex and the City” back in 2000. Magnolia itself is now
planning a mail-order business, joining a host of shops from coast to coast. And
for the truly cupcake-obsessed, there are a slew of blogs devoted to the latest
newsincluding, among other things, updates on cupcake tattoos.
Are these people on a sugar high?
To find out if cupcakes could really deliver on their snack potential by
overnight mail, we tested a variety of services, from local specialty shops to
national chains. We ordered up more than 30 cupcakes in all, requesting that
they be delivered on the date of our choice. For the “control” in the
experiment: We whipped up a batch of cupcakes using a $2.99 grocery-store cake
mix to compare against the mail-order treats. Then, we invited a dozen friends
to put them to a taste test.
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