Awesome Cupcake Facts!
In the last few years, the humble cupcake has taken on new popularity. Trendy shops have opened up all over the US, and it has become the national treat du jour. In our continuing effort to educate the public in all matters of taste and importance, we present the following 100% true and well-researched facts about cupcakes.
Most people think the term “cupcake” comes from idea that a cupcake looks like a cake cooked in a cup. However, the truth is that cupcakes are so named because this was a snack that could be stored inside a protective athletic cup during baseball games. Abner Doubleday himself may have been the first to tuck a cake there, and he was known to reach down for a nibble of his “cup cake” even while running the bases.
The first cupcakes did not have frosting as we know it, but instead were gilded with lard as a kind of cake-moistening gravy. Winston Churchill was the first person to suggest a kind of sweet frosting on the top of the cakes. He later blamed the frosting for his behemoth jowls.
While generally assumed to be about psychedelic drugs, John Lennon’s song Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds is actually about cupcakes. This came as a surprise to all Beatles scholars because it contains no mention of cupcakes or hidden references to them. John Lennon was later quoted in an interview, “You never know what you’re writing when you write a song, it’s only years later you realize the truth. You think you’re writing about other people, but you’re really writing about cupcakes. Goo goo ga joob. Imagine. Yoko Ono.”
Although in the past an effeminate male was referred to in a disparaging way as a “cupcake,” more recently an effeminate male is referred to as a “cupcake” in a complimentary way!
H.P. Lovecraft blamed the creation of his most famous mythical monster, Cthulhu, on an overdose of cupcakes. He had locked himself in his basement with a dozen of them and eaten until the rush of sugar caused him to hallucinate about ultimate evil. He later wrote to Robert E Howard, “As the 12th cake of cup sat on the downward stairwell that is my tongue a vision appeared before me as plain as I see the paper in front of myself now. A many-tentacled beast, the personification of chaos and destruction, peeking through from another universe. Arkham Asylum. Miskatonic University. Thinly-masked anti-semitism.”
CUPCAKES BY THE NUMBERS
One cupcake is consumed for every adult in the US every day. If you haven’t had yours, you better wrestle one away from that chubby dude standing in front of the bakery.
The number of cupcakes eaten last year have more mass than the entire Earth!
There are more than five different kinds of cupcakes!
I can eat three cupcakes in one sitting!