Cupcake Craze!

I've never needed much inspiration to bake or eat a whole batch of cupcakes... in fact, I must confess that I've always been a bit cupcake crazy. Now I'm not alone! Celebrities are going wild for sugary designer cupcakes and charming cupcake boutiques are popping up from coast to coast. To celebrate this 2008 cupcake craze, I wanted to recognize a few of the celebrity favorites that started the new cupcake buzz.

Magnolia Bakery, NYC

Since 1996 Magnolia Bakery has been serving up sweet, buttercream-topped confections to Manhattanites and tourists alike. The Magnolia cupcakes are so popular that customers are limited to only a dozen per person.

Magnolia was started by Allysa Torey and Jennifer Appel with a mission to make breads. After a week of struggling to make bread without enough time, hands and space, Allysa opted to start whipping up cakes instead. When they had extra batter from the small 6" cakes, they started making cupcakes instead of letting it go to waste. The pink-frosted vanilla cupcakes soon became one of Allysa's most popular creations, and as word of mouth broadcast the tastiness of Magnolia's treats, the cupcake craze began.

Torey and Appel wrote a best-selling cookbook together called The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook: Old-Fashioned Recipe's from New York's Sweetest Bakery before parting ways in 2000, when Jennifer started her own Buttercup Bake Shop in Midtown Manhattan.

Further fueling Magnolia's popularity, it was featured in an episode of Sex and the City, as well as a widely circulated SNL short called Lazy Sunday with Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg.

Sprinkles, Beverly Hills
I have been hearing about Sprinkles Cupcakes everywhere lately. It's in US Weekly, it's on E!, it is on Oprah, the Martha Stewart Show... it seems that every time I turn on the TV there's a gorgeous Sprinkles cupcake to haunt me!

It's no wonder... the designer cupcakes by Sprinkles are wildly popular with celebrities, and now the cupcake boutique has become more of a chain, with locations from Beverly Hills to Houston, and with more locations planned to open soon reaching all the way to the East coast, and even to Boston (yay!).

If you don't live near a Sprinkles, Sprinkles can come to you. Now you can order their cupcake mix from Williams-Sonoma and bake up your own batch of cupcakes in your very own kitchen. Williams-Sonoma offers Sprinkles' chocolate, vanilla, lemon and devil's food cake mixes so you can make a whole collection of these celeb favorites for your next birthday party. Hey, if they're good enough for Katie to give to Tom, and Bridget to get for Heff and Holly's anniversary, then they're good enough for anyone!