Monday, August 6, 2007
Food & Life Remembrance of cupcakes past
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Mon, Aug 6, 2007 at 4:45 PM
I'm sure you remember from your French literature class that the 3,000 pages of Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past, now often translated as In Search of Lost Time) begin with the author's savoring of a madeleine, the little shell-shaped, lemony cake you can now find wrapped in cellophane beside the cash register of every Starbucks. It's the quintessential reminder of the way taste can spontaneously evoke memory.
Me? I've got cupcakes. Whenever I see one, I remember Johnny Mackie, who lived across the street from us in Charlotte when I was a kid. He was kind of like Eddie Haskell on "Leave It to Beaver." He was smarmy and overly polite around the adults but he was at his happiest grossing out the kids in the ’hood by feeding white mice to his pet snake or displaying the praying mantises he raised in his mother's garden.
One year, at Johnny's outdoor birthday party, his mother served cupcakes instead of the usual cake. This was a novelty in itself but the cupcakes' icing went way beyond the pale — to a repulsively bilious green, to be precise, a color that reminded me of dead frogs. It got worse. The icing was dried out. I remember it being almost crisp and then, mixed with saliva, it turned into what I imagined Crisco straight up must taste like.
I swallowed one bite of the cupcake and ran across the street, hid behind our house and vomited violently. I could not eat cupcakes for years and, in fact, I wouldn't eat any kind of icing, either. Once, sitting bored at my desk in class, I began ruminating — in an 8-year-old's Proustian fashion — on Johnny's cupcakes and I vomited on the spot. Hey, I got to go home for the rest of the day!
This loathing of cupcakes has honestly haunted me most of my life. I long ago realized that all cupcakes are not repulsive and yet none has been good enough to fully eclipse the nauseating memory. Until a few months ago when I happened to sample one at MetroFresh. It was an amazing testimony to the beauty of lemons. Its moist cake, infused with the fruit's flavor, was topped with even more intensely lemon, sweet frosting. It was so good, I bought a second and ate it on the spot, which prompted my friend to devour one, too. Just the opposite of my childhood experience.
The cupcakes turned out to be made by Jamie Fahey and Lori Glover, who own the Atlanta Cupcake Factory. The good news is that they have opened a shop at 624 N. Highland Ave. (678-358-9195). The bad news is that it's only open to retail trade 6:30-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. You can place orders and arrange pick up or delivery, in some cases, but if you just wanna stop by on impulse to give yourself a facial with some of the 20-odd varieties, you'll need to wait until the weekend.
My impression is that the bakery sells out quickly. The display cabinet was nearly empty when I visited about 9 p.m. Saturday. I did score three lemon, plus a chocolate mocha, a banana ganache and an utterly ridiculous looking "snowball" made of devil's food cake with marshmallow frosting and very, very pink coconut.
The shop itself is basically a counter and a kitchen in that rickety strip of shops on North Highland between Ponce de Leon and North avenues. Please note in the photo above the preponderance of pink — the pink snowball cupcake in the case, the pink blouse of the owner and the pink boxes behind her. I love this place! It has healed me of my traumatic memories of cupcake abuse and I now crave exactly what I once detested. Thank God they aren't open all the time.
And that brings me to the subject of muffins, a cupcake-shaped breakfast food I have never liked, either ... but I'll leave that for another time.
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