Killer cupcakes

Cupcakes are making a comeback. Once relegated to kids' birthday parties and neighborhood bake sales, they're now starring in formal venues, such as weddings.

In the past couple of years, bakeries known as "cupcakeries" or "cupcake boutiques" have sprouted up in big cities — Cupcakes in Chicago, Magnolia Bakery in New York and Sprinkles Cupcakes in Beverly Hills, Calif. But the fad is apparently just getting started in Utah.

"I'm starting to see a lot more cupcakes here, but not bakeries devoted just to cupcakes like they have in other big cities," said Romina Rasmussen, owner of Les Madeleines. "They've been on the coast for awhile and are working their way inward."

"I've always loved them. They're the perfect portion size, and you can play around with different flavors and do some fun things with them."

Every day Rasmussen's bakery offers chocolate and vanilla cupcakes, plus one specialty. That might be pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting or coconut cake filled with dulce de leche and topped with coconut. She also likes decorating them with tiny frosted sugar cookies. A regular-size cupcake sells for $1.75; minis are 93 cents each.

The bakery did carrot cupcakes for an 85th birthday celebration, with cream cheese frosting and little pink sugar cookies on top. "When there's 100 of them together, it's really striking," Rasmussen said. "She (the customer) wanted everything bright green and bright pink."

"We've been doing cupcakes since we opened almost four years ago," said Therese Martin, owner of Carlucci's Bakery. "They're not your plain run-of-the-mill cupcakes. We always have some type of filling and cutesy toppings, and they change with the seasons. In the summer, when berries were at the top of their season, we featured them on the top of lemon cake with lemon-curd filling. Now we're doing ghost and spider ones."

Cakes de Fleur recently did a "cupcake tree" for a wedding cake. "It was five tiers high, and we did 600 cupcakes. Some were on the table below, and they kept replenishing the tiers," said owner Lauralee Morrison. "We did yellow-and-green polka dots on one-fourth of them, the couple's initials on one-fourth, grass on one-fourth, and a handmade flower on the last fourth."

Schmidt's Pastry Cottage has also been asked to do wedding cupcakes. "A lot of times they'll want a flower in their colors on each one, and then they're placed in tiers. They can't get a lot of them on each tier, but they can keep replenishing it," said owner Steve Borg.