National Cupcake Week and what it means for you

This glorious week is held in celebration of the wonderfully decorated, sumptuously sweet morsels of cake that we Brits have grown to love. Throughout the week, people are encouraged to experiment with new recipes, support their local cupcake shops by going out and buying even more cupcakes than usual and there’s a cupcake creation competition too!

The National Cupcake Championships are open to amateur and professional bakers and reward technical skill and innovation. There are a number of different categories, so there’s plenty of scope for creativity.

If you run a bakery or cake shop, it’s a great time to run discounts or events to raise awareness of your business and even if your business isn’t as cake focussed, you might consider adding some cupcake-shaped specials to your usual menu.

The rise and rise of the cupcake

Cupcakes are officially one of our favourite bakes here in the UK. Although we reported in our recent blog post about British baking trends that Brits are now baking slightly less, according to the figures, we still have a sweet spot for cupcakes. Research from Mintel published in August reveals that of those people who do bake, 57 per cent make small cakes such as cupcakes and with the cake decorating market growing at an impressive rate, we’re all getting a little competitive about making them look good too!

The History of the cupcake

The name ‘cupcake’ first surfaced in 1796 in a book called American Cookery by Amelia Simmons as denoting a cake that could be baked in a cup, which was how things were baked before handy muffin pans came into existence. Of course, in the UK we’d been calling small cakes all kinds of things before the American term became more prominent, though purists would say there’s a definite difference between a fairy cake and a cupcake.

How cupcakes came over the Pond to the UK is a matter of contention, though they were undoubtedly popularised in part by the appearance of stores like the Magnolia Bakery on the show Sex and the City. The rise of blogging and social media has also had a part to play in the spread of cupcake love, with sites like Instagram providing insta-cupcake fixes and Pinterest and blogs sharing recipes and ideas.

Google trends graph showing the rise of the search term ‘cupcake’

It’s easy to see how interest in these tasty treats has developed by taking a look at a Google trends chart, which shows the rise in searches for the term cupcake over the last ten years.

Cupcake essentials

Thanks to baking pans and trays there’s no real need to bake cupcakes in small pottery cups anymore, though they do look extra cute and kitsch if you do. In fact, there’s a whole world of cupcake paraphernalia now available to help you create innovative and great tasting cakes. Some cupcake specialist essentials are:

• Cupcake trays/muffin pans
• Cupcake liners or cases
• Individual silicone cupcake moulds
• Cupcake boxes
• Cupcake stands
• Cupcake corers
• Cupcake toppers
• Edible glitter
• Piping kit
• Basic sugarcraft kit

• Ida Freund, the first female chemistry lecturer in the UK is credited with creating the first periodic table of cupcakes; a collection of cupcakes decorated and arranged to represent the elements of the periodic table. She did this while teaching her students at Cambridge University in 1907.

• The World Record for longest line of cupcakes measured 606.6 meters and was achieved in Colombia in December 2013. However, a Milton Keynes woman is hoping to break the record with the help of her community this November, you can read more about her here.

• The world’s most expensive cupcake cost an eye-watering £540 to create and was commissioned by a Canadian man as a 40^th birthday gift to his wife. Along with some incredibly gourmet ingredients like Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee and Amedei Italian chocolate, the cupcake was dusted with 24 karat gold flakes and sprinkled with diamonds! Let’s hope she didn’t eat any of those by accident.