Omnivore Atlanta

Our friend the Blissful Glutton has a report on yet another new cupcake spot.

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Atlanta Cuisine, the monthly tabloid published by AtlantaCuisine.com, will publish its first “readers’ choice” issue this month. In the September issue, publisher Tom Maicon cited his own choice for most annoying food trend:

Let’s see … most annoying food trend? Last year was easily cupcakes. But this year the most annoying food trend to me is the whole southern farm-to-table thing. Don’t think for a big-city minute that it’s the farm-to-table part of this trend that grates my last nerve — I can respect a freshly plucked vegetable just as much as the next guy — but it’s the over-used southern part of this trend that rubs me the wrong way. I mean…do we really need another southern farm-to-table concept?

For the remainder of this year and next I’ll be on the lookout for chefs who aren’t sheeople too….chefs who are willing to choose that path less taken. I’m looking for chefs like Hector Santiago of Pura Vida and Lamar Thomas of East West Bistro in Athens, Ga. who aren’t afraid to take local ingredients and do interesting things with them, rather than just mindlessly serve the awaiting public another tiresome deviled egg.

I eat to expand the mind as much, if not more, than to fill my belly. I want well-thought flavors, textures, and temperatures. I want to eat something that isn’t being overdone everywhere else in town. I want bold ethnic flavors with my so-called farm-to-table ingredients. Wouldn’t that be cool?

You can read the entire column by downloading the PDF file of the September issue on Atlanta Cuisine’s site.

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My cupcake addiction knows no bounds. While Little Cake Bakery remains my favorite because of its range of flavors and quality ingredients (like the strawberry wawa and orange dream, pictured), these little beauties are a nice option when I just don’t feel like driving to Buckhead. Moist cake, the right amount of frosting and cutesy “cupcake flags” if you are gifting or serving at a party.
Sweet Pockets Cupcakes, 660 Irwin Street, 30312 (inside the Irwin Street Market), 404-584-2826, www.sweet-pockets.com.

(Photo by Jennifer Zyman)

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Yet more words on cupcakes appeared recently in the New York Times. It seems that the Cupcake Renaissance is also the Cupcake Problem:

As we know, cupcakes have had a whopping resurgence: they are retro-food chic, the thing to eat for people in the know.

But cupcakes have also recently been marched to the front lines of the fat wars, banned from a growing number of classroom birthday parties because of their sugar, fat and “empty calories,” a poster food of the child obesity crisis. This was clear when children returned to school this month to a tightening of regulations, federal and state, on what can be served up between the bells.

And it has led some to wonder whether emotional value, on occasion, might legitimately outweigh nutritional value.

Schools trying to bring parents to the table in efforts to root out fat and sugar have faced what Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University who strongly supports limiting sweets in schools, calls “the cupcake problem.”

When included on lists of treats that parents are discouraged or forbidden to send to school — and when those policies are, say, put to a vote at the P.T.A. — “cupcakes are deal breakers,” Professor Nestle said. “It sounds like a joke, but it’s a very serious problem on a number of levels. You have to control it.”

Read the whole story here.

USA Today also printed a (less alarmist) piece on cupcakes recently. Check it out here.

(Photo of Mr. Met with cupcakes from “What about the plastic animals?”)

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