Red Velvet Cupcakery is not much more than a very pretty vestibule. The owner's not there, and there's no place to sit, but I order a cupcake anyway, a Southern Belle—the bakery's signature red velvet. I take it next door to the frozen yogurt place, which is decorated in stark white with oscillating light boxes in the middle of the floor. I bite into the cupcake straight on, attacking the side of it like Jaws. The sugar rush hits me. Then comes the crash, a serious one. As the light boxes in the yogurt place go purple green red yellow blue, I slip into a daze. The top-heavy cupcake in front of me slumps over, like a drunk sliding off a barstool. It's now face down in the napkin, its delicate cake betrayed by its weighty icing.
At which point, a thought crosses my mind: Isn't this whole cupcake thing a total fad? Is it about to experience a crash of its own?
I never raised these doubts with D.C.'s cupcake entrepreneurs. But I never had to. Almost all of them brought up the subject—either asked me what I thought or volunteered that the company had some sort of Plan B. (Sprinkles, for instance, is drawing up plans for a frozen dessert place.) Some entrepreneurs even accused me of being coy, saying I must really be working on a story about the death of the cupcake trend. It's easy to understand the worry. The American fascination with cupcakes, a dessert that has been around for decades, seems euphoric, too good to be true.
I stagger outside. I need to find a place where I can buy a salad. I do. I eat it, savoring the cold, crisp lettuce and the dressing's acidity. Then I head back to my hotel and collapse.
"Your Cupcakes F---in' Suck!"
That night, after regaining my strength, I find myself in a drab commercial area north of Georgetown, inside a basement bar unmarked outside except for a small, illuminated sign and a chalkboard easel reading Cupcake Wars, Tonight! It's almost 9 p.m., and—I'm not kidding—there are about 200 rowdy fans staring up at TVs blasting the Food Network. That's when Doron Petersan, the tattooed, raven-haired owner of Sticky Fingers Sweets & Eats, where I had had the cookies-and-cake number earlier, leaps onto the top of the bar and shouts for attention. Tonight, Sticky Fingers, an all-vegan bakery, will be one of the contestants on Food Network's Cupcake Wars. She thanks the crowd, which has come out to support Petersan and her eggless, milkless cupcakes.
"I want you to enjoy the cupcakes!" Petersan shouts, gesturing to the boxes she's brought. "And I want you to drink!" She hoists her own glass of straight rye whiskey. The crowd roars.
Petersan founded Sticky Fingers almost nine years ago. Back then, cupcakes were incidental to the enterprise, just another item in her display case. Then, around 2007, the cupcakes started selling like never before. So she made more.
But veganism was still the main thing. Petersan has been a vegan since 1995, when she was inspired by an internship at PETA. She opened Sticky Fingers in the gentrifying neighborhood of Columbia Heights, in part to serve the students, artists, and activists who were moving in, but also to prove something: Vegan food can be delicious when done right. "I wanted to dispel the stereotype of vegan cardboard," she says.
To Petersan, tonight's episode is a chance to help prove her political point on a national stage, the same thing her business does locally every day. As the show's first elimination round approaches, the crowd, fueled by Pabst Blue Ribbon and hefeweizen and whiskey, shouts at the screen. It boos loudly when the contestant from Worcester, Massachusetts, describes her cupcakes as "very Sex and the City." When Mona Zavosh, a perky lady from Los Angeles, begins to speak about her cupcakes onscreen, a guy in the back shouts over her, "Your cupcakes f—-in' suck!"
There is a moment of tension during the second round of the competition. Zavosh gets the thumbs-up, leaving Petersan and the Worcester lady to face elimination. And there, staring them down from the judges' table, is Candace Nelson of Sprinkles—who, as of a few days earlier, is Petersan's newest competitor in D.C.
"Did you use seltzer water in this chocolate cupcake?" Nelson asks. The answer is no. "I think you should have!" she says. "I was missing that fluffiness, and the lift from the first round, and this one didn't hold together well."
Petersan grimaces. But Nelson ends up being mostly complimentary, as are the other judges. Maybe Nelson was just toying with her. Petersan survives.
She carries the third round. Her hip cupcake igloo structure overwhelms Zavosh's dowdy curtain-and-stage setup, and as the host announces that Sticky Fingers is the winner, the crowd at the bar erupts again. "Tonight," says Leah Nathan, a friend of Petersan's from the animal protection community, "we showed everyone veganism is not just about weirdo food." They celebrate.
I hop into a taxi a little after 10 p.m. and head back to my hotel. From its corporate managers to its foodie activists to its scrappy food truck drivers, D.C.'s cupcake panorama had revealed itself to me. But could anyone compete with Sprinkles's strategic discipline? The week before, I had interviewed Charles Nelson. Though he happily told me the same anecdotes I had heard him and his wife say in every press interview—her lifelong love of baking, the L.A. landlord who hung up on them at the sheer outlandishness of a cupcake bakery, the Cinderella story of how Barbra Streisand ate their cupcakes, fell in love, and sent them to Oprah—he stopped me short when I asked to get the inside story of their business. "We're really not interested in anything behind the scenes," he said. From celebrity endorsements to polished talking points, the Nelsons had the pieces in place to market a high-end, national brand. The Washington store would soon be followed by a New York outpost. They weren't about to take any chances opening up to some nosy cupcake reporter.
There was only one cupcake place left in D.C. I could think of that could possibly rival Sprinkles. As I went to bed around 11, my appointment there—to observe the baking of the next day's first cupcakes—was only two hours away. I tried to get to sleep. The sugar in my blood was turning sickly.
1,080 Cupcakes Before Dawn
When I wake up at 12:40 a.m., I despise cupcakes. I struggle into my coat. Outside, it's frigid.
