People, they are just tiny cakes. Same formulas, same frosting, just smaller. Why all the fuss? I like a cupcake just as much as the next person — well, maybe not, actually, since the “next person” is busy rhapsodizing about cupcakes with a passion that borders on fevered — but they have just a simple, transitory appeal to me: someone offers one to me, I accept it, I enjoy it (“Yay, nice couple of bites of cake!”), I move on. I don’t drive/bus/bike uptown/downtown/anywhere to find them. I don’t pursue them with a single-minded determination. I don’t plan a ladies lunch around them. In fact, the list of things I WON’T do for a cupcake far outnumbers the list for what I WILL do for one.

So the fact that Williams-Sonoma has rolled out a section on their website titled “The Cupcake Shop” says more to me about Williams-Sonoma than it does to me about cupcakes. Don’t follow the trends, Wms.-S.; set them. Surely there is life after cupcakes.

To quote Jacob Goldstein at NPR, as he explores the idea of what he calls the cupcake bubble,  “Did they really think cupcakes were different than cake?” (See the short article, here, referenced in The Huffington Post.)

To be fair, some disagree. CNN Living entreats us to stop calling cupcakes a fad. Apparently, they are an industry. Click here to read that argument.

Well, goodness, now I just don’t know. Maybe if the box of cupcakes had three-dimensional sculpted modeling chocolate carvings of frolicking kittens I would mend my cupcake hatin’ ways…nope, still just a cupcake.