Cupcakes are catching on and now they have their own camp, with tickets a sell-out thanks to Twitter
LAVISHLY ICED with inch-thick pastel-coloured frosting, the cupcake is the undisputed queen of buns. Fairy-tale cute and shamelessly girly, they have names such as red velvet, diva and mojito – cupcakes are more like fetishised fashion statements than bakery items. Celebrities exchange them as chi-chi gifts (apparently Heidi Klum gave Victoria Beckham a year’s supply for her birthday last year), while an upsurge in boutique cupcake bakeries – as well as the cannier supermarkets – satisfy the popular appetite for these super-sweet American confections.
Now Belfast is poised to host Europe’s first ever Cupcake Camp, where cupcake-fanciers will gather for a day of baking, displaying, tip-swapping and, of course, devouring. More than 100 participants are expected at the sold-out event, which will be held on Saturday at the Blick Studios, an art gallery on the Malone Road in south Belfast. And it’s all been organised through the Twitter social networking site by 17-year-old schoolboy Ciaran Madden.
“I’m a tech, Twitter and internet junkie so when I heard about Cupcake Camp I thought, well why not? It’s an ad-hoc gathering. You bake the cupcakes at home, you bring them along, and you share them. That’s all there is to it,” says Madden.
But it’s not all cosy munching. As well as demonstrations from local professional bakers, there will be three strenuously-fought competitions at the camp: best overall, best decorated and best summer-themed cupcake. Judging criteria include “taste, aesthetics, thought process, use of seasonal ingredients, and special dietary requirement allowances”. Clearly, these people take their cupcakes seriously.
Why did Madden decide to get involved? After all, he’s not exactly your average cupcake queen, and this isn’t your average summer-holiday project. “Well, us nerds really do adore cupcakes,” he laughs. “I’m big into cooking, and it was a natural progression. They’re dead cheap to make and visually appealing.” Madden warns that cupcakes aren’t as easy to create as they look. “You have to have the quantities perfect, or it’ll all go haywire. I had an icing malfunction the other day, when the butter and sugar curdled.”
The first camp entirely dedicated to the art of the cupcake was held last year in San Francisco, with 2,016 registered entries competing for honours. The event is now held in 16 cities across north America, as well as in India, Australia and New Zealand. And things can get pretty extreme. A highlight of the inaugural San Francisco proceedings was the “Elvis Cupcake”, otherwise known as “The Graceland”, which contained banana cake, cream cheese, a dark chocolate molten middle, peanut-butter frosting and brown-sugar-cured bacon.
As experienced organisers acknowledge, one of the challenges of managing a camp is stopping people eating all the most tempting cupcakes before they have been judged. The answer? Strategically-placed cupcake bouncers to hold the hordes back. And to avoid sugar overload when sampling, the advice is to nibble only the smallest pieces of each cupcake.
But even in the absence of a cupcake the size, depth and density of the mighty Graceland, aren’t participants likely to suffer the consequences of over-indulgence by the end of the day? “Hopefully we won’t feel too sick,” says Madden. “There’ll be plenty of coffee on the go to wash the cakes down.” As for his own favourite cupcake, Madden confides that it’s Earl Grey tea flavour – a surprisingly elegant choice in a culinary field dominated by pinkness, stickiness and rainbow-coloured sprinkles.
http://cupcakecampni.org
