Jaime: This one is for you…

I’m sure you have noticed the relentless advance of US-inspired bakery in our cities and towns, aided by diverse TV shows (currently, for instance, Cupcake Wars on Divinity). This invasion of muffins, cupcakes and an endless variety of decorated cakes has been quite fast and, as it happens with fashions that take on very quickly, it seems to have left us with the impression that American bakery is already part of our local Spanish culture. Well, it is not, though I assume it is here to stay.

Reconstructing the history of this recent cultural import is by no means easy. (In case you have been on planet Mars in the last decade, you can take a basic tutorial from “Magdalenas, Muffins y Cupcakes: Diferencias” at http://denikatessen.blogspot.com.es/2013/05/magdalenas-muffins-diferencias.html). To satisfy my own curiosity I did a Google search limited by year, beginning in 1996, and although I do know that this is not 100% realiable, the results seem to make a certain sense. Let’s start with the muffins, then move onto the cupcakes.

Muffins seems to be a McDonald’s import, at least this is what a question formulated back on 1/02/2001 in the website El Preguntón (www.ruper.net/El%20Pregunton.htm‎) suggests: “¿Por qué en el McDonald las magdalenas se llaman Muffins y no McDalenas?” The first references to ‘muffins’ I’ve come across go back actually to 2000: an early recipe for honey muffins (10/03/2000, http://jgmoyay.apagada.com/recetas.htm#38), and an article on polidextrose (02/02/2000, www.espatentes.com/pdf/2207816_t3.pdf‎) in which the author considers s/he needs to explain that muffins are “bollos o bizcochos similares a la magdalena.” So… the next step would perhaps ask McDonalds Spain… Funnily, I was under the impression that Starbucks was responsible for the popularisation of muffins, but it landed in Spain in 2002 when McDonalds was already offering muffins –or so it seems.

Now –cupcakes. This is complicated… and for a very peculiar reason it’s easy to detect plenty of rivalry regarding claims as to who opened the first cupcake establishment in Spain. I’ll stake the totally unproven claim that cupcakes were introduced in Spain in 1994, when the first Taste of America shop opened (http://www.tasteofamerica.es/historia). At least I’m reasonably sure that they must have sold already products to bake cupcakes at home. Now, I’ve found at least three likely contenders for the title of first Spanish bakery especialising in American cupcakes: 1) Acaramelada in Madrid (it seems to have opened in November 2000), offering “repostería creativa” (the finished product, courses, materials); 2) Patricia Arribálzaga’s shop (http://www.tartasdecoradasycupcakes.com/), which opened in 2001 and specialised in ‘designer cupcakes’; 3) and Golden Cupcake (http://goldencupcake.com), from León, which announce themselves as “la primera franquicia de repostería creativa” though I should contact them to find out when they started. By the way, the most popular blog in this area seems to be “El rincón de Bea” (http://www.elrincondebea.com/), since 2008.

You may have heard something about cupcakes and the TV series Sex and the City. Yes, correct: Mikel López Iturriaga explains that “Carrie y sus amigas no sólo enseñaron a las americanas que los cupcakes eran cool y te curaban de cualquier tipo de desencuentro con la vida, sino que les hizo vivir la fantasía de que no engordaban.” (“Todo lo que debes saber sobre los ‘cupcakes’”, 21/07/2010, http://blogs.elpais.com/el-comidista/2010/07/moda-cupcakes-magdalenas.html). In particular, Carrie and her posh friends were the clients of Magnolia Bakery (http://www.magnoliabakery.com/). Now, Sexo en Nueva York was first broadcast in Spain by the subscription channel Cosmopolitan in 2000. It seems, then, quite likely that cupcakes, introduced more or less by then, actually came to Spain on the personal initiative of travellers who discovered in situ American bakery. The series may have just confirmed the popularity of cupcakes among middle- and upper-class urban women.

Personally, I don’t like very much neither muffins nor cupcakes –too rich, too cloying. I’m not going to defend ‘magdalenas’ here, which, ironically, are also a cultural import, this time from French baking culture. I simply like much better the very fine local patisserie in Barcelona (think Farga), which seems to me much more elegant in texture and flavour than the US-inspired bakery. As I’m sure you are noticing, I feel actually quite annoyed by this American import because it seems to be yet another colonial surrender to a culture that has already overwhelmed us in excess.

In contrast, I’ll defend the cosmopolitan virtues of another cultural import to Barcelona: the patisseri Ochiai with its Japanese specialities (http://www.ochiaipastisseria.com/). This is run by Takashi Okiai since 1983 (he’s one of those ‘romantic’ migrants few studies of migration seem to notice). One of his star products is the ‘dorayaki,’ “а red bean pancake which consists of two small pancake-like patties made from castella wrapped around a filling of sweet Azuki red bean paste” (Wikipedia explains). All Catalan kids know about ‘dorayaki’ because it’s what the space cat Doraemon eats in the eponynous cartoon TV series.

There’s, as you can see, a great difference between the cosmopolitanism of cultural variety (= the dorayaki) and the invasion backed by US imperialist cultural colonisation (= the muffins and cupcakes).

This post, by the way, is 100% Cultural Studies… I’ll let in other hands the continuation of the work started here, you’re very welcome. It’s been fun!!

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them first for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. If you like my blog, you can subscribe using the RSS feed (right-hand column, below Blogroll.) You’ll get an email message for every new post. VISIT MY WEB: http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/