Cupcakes

It was the third week of July, 2024. The high temperature for the day was twenty-nine degrees Celsius, which for the unfamiliar is hot enough that I made sure to ask the people at the bake shop if the cupcakes’ frosting was prone to melting in the heat. They looked up my order — three six-packs of confetti cupcakes — and said no, the cupcakes’ buttercream frosting would be fine. “They won’t melt,” this young woman told me, her hair tied back into a taut, slick bun. She smiled reassuringly. “It’ll be okay.”

The cupcakes were intended for a five-year-old’s birthday. Wanting apparently to impress the kid, I had ordered the cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery, which had supposedly been “at the forefront of the 1990s ‘cupcake craze’” — a set of events that the five-year-old was unaware of, and which I only knew vicariously. But I was pretty sure the cupcakes would be cute, and the errand would justify a bike ride halfway across the city, and anyway I didn’t believe I had ever eaten anything from Magnolia Bakery before. So earlier in the week I had placed the twee order, and was pretty pleased with myself when the bright-eyed bake shop staff opened the boxes’ lids and showed me the cupcakes’ whimsically sculpted frosting.

I thrill at the idea of carrying some delicacy across the city by bike. I strapped the Magnolia boxes into my front basket, making sure not to secure them too tightly, lest they be crushed. Then I rode back to Brooklyn the way that made the most sense, taking Bleecker Street, then Chrystie, then the Manhattan Bridge. My route from the Manhattan Bridge home was automatic, it being the one that I take almost a hundred percent of the time, with teeny variations in the last dozen or so blocks. I know more or less every single ripple in the asphalt along this route, and just how hard I can take each turn, and I rode home deliberately yet quickly, trusting the buttercream but not wanting to push my luck too far. It was hot out, close to that twenty-nine-degree high temperature, but I felt good about the whole thing — proud of myself for getting the kid such a special treat, and proud of myself for riding my bike something like twenty kilometers in order to procure it. “These cupcakes are gonna go over great,” I thought to myself.

I got home, positively beaming and definitely sweating too, and pulled my bike inside. If the load I’m carrying is heavy I’ll usually bring it into the front hall before the bike, but in this case I would have pulled the whole bike in, hanging it on its rack and then unstrapping the three boxes of pastel-colored, confetti-sprinkled cupcakes so that I could bring them into the kitchen. The kids weren’t home yet, and the party wasn’t actually until the following day; my efforts were both impressive and also well ahead of schedule. And so what if the cupcakes were kind of expensive on a per-unit basis. There were only eighteen of them, and five years old is a pretty great age for a kid to form some good birthday memories. I was stoked.

In the kitchen with the confections, I cut one of the foil stickers that held the boxes’ lids closed. I set the box down on the counter, next to the stove, and opened the lid, and saw the bottoms of six cupcakes staring back up at me.

All of the cupcakes in this box had flipped during transit, their top-heavy shapes, and the buttercream’s density, inverting each and every one. I opened the second box, and the third — every single cupcake was frosting-side-down. It was a bloodbath: A few cupcakes had shifted left and right after having flipped, smearing pastel-colored frosting around on the bottom of the box. Attempts to remove the cupcakes from the boxes left blobs of purple, yellow, and blue buttercream behind. Not to mention the confetti sprinkles, whose distribution was haphazard and not at all aesthetic.

But what could be done? An offset spatula was retrieved, and the frosting — which had not melted — was re-applied and sculpted into something cute-adjacent. Care was taken not to mix the blue with the yellow, and a big, pink “5” candle was stuck into one of the more elegantly-misshapen treats. The whole thing was lopsided, and in my mind kind of a disaster. But the five-year-old, to her immense credit, ate it all up.