Magnolia Bakery
Magnolia Bakery is a chain of bakeries that was originally founded in New York City . The first store opened in 1996 at 401 Bleecker Street in the popular West Village . The bakery is best known for its cupcakes and is considered one of the origins for the cupcake trend that started in the late 1990s. The specialties of the bakery, which is committed to southern cuisine, also include Red Velvet Cakes . The Magnolia Bakery is credited with contributing to the resurgence in popularity of this type of cake, which is typically a light to dark red or reddish brown color, which is the result of a chemical reaction between cocoa and buttermilk.
Company history
Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey founded Magnolia Bakery in July 1996. They began selling cupcakes lavishly decorated with buttercream caps in the fall of 1996 if there was any batter left over from making birthday cakes. The cupcakes turned out to be very popular with customers. As early as 1997, there were occasional queues of customers who wanted this type of pastry in particular. The bakery was increasingly mentioned in the press, and some airline magazines referred to it as New York's in-place. In 1999, the New York Times reported in a short article on the increasing popularity of cupcakes and named several New York bakeries that now had them in their range. Magnolia Bakery differed from the other bakeries, among other things, in that it also had opinion leaders from the media world among its customers. This earned the bakery a contract with the Simon & Schuster publishing house back in 1998 . The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook was launched in the fall of 1999 .
Despite the success, co-founder Jennifer Appel left the company because she could not agree with Allysa Torey on the further expansion of the store. Appel opened the Buttercup Bake Shop elsewhere in Manhattan . In 2006 Allysa Torey sold the bakery to Steve Abrams, who has been running the company ever since.
Magnolia Bakery and the cupcake trend
On July 9, 2000 the episode obstacle course (original title of the episode: No Ifs, Ands, or Butts ) of the series Sex and the City was first broadcast on US television. There is a short scene of the two actresses Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon in their roles as Miranda and Carrie, which shows them on a bench in front of Magnolia Bakery. The character Carrie eats a cupcake while she discusses her current relationship problems with Miranda. The entire scene lasts only 20 seconds, but is believed to be the reason why the preference for cupcakes developed into a US-wide trend. David Sax calls this "amazing" in his analysis of the emergence and termination of food trends, because other trends that owe their popularity to this series, including the cocktail Cosmopolitan , shoes by designer Manolo Blahnik and a certain form of vibrators , are either a recurring one Subject or essential element of a single episode. One of the possible reasons is the city tours that took fans to locations in the series, including Magnolia Bakery. Cupcakes, an actually unspectacular pastry that was baked for a long time mainly for children's birthdays, acquired a hip, sexy nimbus through use in the series Sex and the City. In an interview with David Sax, Jennifer Appel pointed out that the customers in her newly founded store had changed noticeably after the episode was broadcast: the most common type of customer now were young, strikingly slim women.
Many people who work for media companies live in the West Village district of Manhattan. As a result, more programs and films were shot in and in front of the Magnolia Bakery. In December 2005, for example, an episode of the comedy show Saturday Night Live played in front of the bakery and also showed one of the cupcakes made there. In the movie Couch Whispers - The First Therapeutic Love Comedy , one of the characters throws a Magnolia Bakery cake at his ex-girlfriend. In the film The Devil Wears Prada , the character played by Anne Hathaway briefly mentions that she wanted to get something from the bakery for her boyfriend. In the sitcom Chaos City , the character played by Charlie Sheen brings, among other things, cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery.
As a result of the increasing popularity of cupcakes, television stations took up the topic and created cooking programs that were exclusively devoted to this type of pastry. Bakers from Magnolia Bakery were a few jurors in the Cupcake Wars baking competition , which has been broadcast by the Food Network television channel since the end of 2009 .
Branches
Magnolia Bakery now has branches in other parts of the USA and has also expanded into other countries. There are branches in Chicago and Los Angeles, among others. The first branch abroad was opened in 2010 in Dubai. Magnolia Bakery has a total of eleven branches abroad. There are branches in Beirut, Dubai, Kuwait City, Doha , Abu Dhabi, Moscow, Tokyo and Mexico City.
literature
- David Sax: The Tastemakers - Why we're Crazy for Cupcakes But Fed Up With Fondue . PublicAffairs 2014, ISBN 978-1-61039-316-4 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Florence Fabricant: So Naughty, So Nice . In: The New York Times , February 14, 2007. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
- ^ David Sax: The Tastemakers . P. 5.
- ^ David Sax: The Tastemakers . P. 6.
- ^ David Sax: The Tastemakers . P. 7.
- ↑ Julia Moskin: Once Just a Cupcake, These Days a Swell . In: The New York Times , November 5, 2003. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
- ↑ Rosalind Resnick: Magnolia Bakery's Sweet Success . In: Entrepreneur , January 11, 2011. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
- ^ David Sax: The Tastemakers . P. 8.
- ^ David Sax: The Tastemakers . P. 9.
- ↑ US locations . Magnoliabakery.com. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
- ↑ Magnolia Bakery's First Overseas Location Opens In Dubai . PR Newswire.com. February 1, 2013. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
- ↑ International Locations . Magnoliabakery.com. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
Coordinates: 40 ° 44 ′ N , 74 ° 0 ′ W