It's a weekend morning at the Alcove in Los Feliz, and every table on the outdoor patio is laden with omelets and hash browns, huevos rancheros and other big brunchy platters -- except for Natalie Light's. On it sits a cupcake.
It's a chocolate chip cupcake the size of a softball.
"I have this every day," she says, eyeing it with reverence as she sinks her fork into it. "And I come early, or they sell out."
At Auntie Em's Kitchen in Eagle Rock, where a line snakes out the door, cupcakes are selling like hot cakes. You'd think this would put owner Terry Wahl's mind at ease, but no.
"It's almost at the point now where we're thinking of limiting how many cupcakes people can buy," Wahl says. "If someone walks in and says, 'I want three dozen,' they would wipe us out." Not to mention depriving all the jonesing cupcake addicts in line.
All over town, the masses are clamoring for cupcakes.
Leda's Bake Shop, a new custom-cake joint in Sherman Oaks, is selling a couple of hundred a day. And that's on top of the special orders that have pastry chef Ledette Gambini churning out dozens more to sate the cupcake-hungry.
Where people have really gone cuckoo over cupcakes, though, is Beverly Hills. At Sprinkles, a "cupcake boutique," owners Charles and Candace Nelson say they're selling around 1,000 a day.
A thousand cupcakes! Line them up, and they'd nearly span a football playing field.
Even some serious chefs are caught up in cupcake fever.
"Cupcakes seem to be the thing," says Annie Miler of Clementine cafe in Century City. "We basically sell as many as we can put out. Sometimes it's hard for us to keep up."
They've also popped up on the menu of the retro-hip Beechwood restaurant in Venice. Chef Brooke Williamson's under the cupcake spell too. With three flavors on one plate, "they're easier to share and more fun," she enthuses. "It's one of the most ordered desserts, if not the most ordered."
There are blogs devoted to cupcakes, and cupcake entries in general blogs. There are tiered stands, ruffled silicone baking cups made just for cupcakes and even a cupcake transportation module -- a plastic container that lets you tote a single cupcake from home to office to beach to Mt. Everest without the frosting getting mussed, even if the cupcake gets turned upside down.
Who knew that the cupcake-itis that struck New York a couple of years ago was so infectious?
