Reasonable and trendy, cupcakes are taking the wedding world by storm
The cupcake craze has spawned a slew of cupcake-specific bakeries in the Washington area, cupcake cookbooks, even a cupcake bake-off on the Food Network. And weddings aren’t immune from the trend.
“Weddings are definitely about the next thing,” said David Guas, an award-winning local pastry chef and consultant whose new Arlington store, Bayou Bakery, opens in early July. “Caterers are looking at ways to do things differently, getting away from cakes on tiers.”
Guas says the cupcake phenomenon can be traced in part to a perception that they’re smaller and thus more diet-friendly than a piece of cake — even if they’re not. “They’re cute because they’re smaller,” he said.
But perhaps even more important is that because the cakes are self-contained single servings, they let guests unleash their inner “child that doesn’t want to share. That plays in our heads.”
Sophie LaMontagne of the popular Georgetown Cupcake identified yet another attractive feature of the miniature confections: cost. “Cupcakes are more reasonable than spending thousands on a wedding cake,” she said. “We don’t require large deposits and don’t charge extra” for wedding-themed decor such as monograms or initials.
She said the bakery has done about six or seven weddings per weekend since April, including some last-minute orders, like an emergency order of 200 after a wedding cake from New York didn’t arrive to a local wedding as expected.
She said the most popular wedding flavors were red velvet and vanilla, although most weddings order a combination of flavors, another advantage over a single-flavor cake.
While most cupcake orders are arranged in towers on-site, LaMontagne said an increasing number of brides were ordering cupcakes to be individually boxed, so their guests could take them home as favors.
But despite the continuing popularity of cupcakes, some brides are moving on to the next trend. Danielle Shevitz of Windows Catering says that while her company is still baking plenty of cupcakes “in all shapes, sizes and flavors … we are finding an increase in popularity of unique dessert offerings, such as dessert and candy buffets where the guests can fill bags with sweets to take home as favors, passed desserts like mini-ice cream cones, cookies and truffle pops, and even a selection of individual pies for guests.”
She said those types of alternatives gave guests plenty of options, while still allowing the couple to have a small cake for the ceremonial cake cutting.
