After a year's worth of cupcakes ranging in colours, sizes, and layers, accompanied with every accessory (bar hair extensions) and classes led by every Brick Lane Cupcaker spilling out into the home, do we give a shit? Well, it appears yes, embarrassingly so.
Cupcakes have made it big regardless of their ability to taste nice; dump a frilly doily under it and the female population will go gaga. They've even made it onto The Junior Apprentice, and replaced wedding cakes (although the bride and groom "cutting the cupcake" sounds suspiciously akin to a Barbie tea party), and I've been caught cooing at them in a shop in a distinct personal low point. I like cake even more than the next child, but really there's only so much cooing over it that you can take.
If you too find mopping yourself clean of lemon icing has become a chore, I advocate lollipops, which are not only sugar-fixes as gorgeous as cake (yes, yes) but can also be operated with the use of only one hand.
Massimo Gammacurta
Last year Lollipops had a design-based attempt at becoming the sickly sweet du jour and showed that as long as it's sweet and looks a bit trendy, we're happy to eat it. Based on a photography project, Massimo Gammacurta created a range of flavours from Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Yves Saint Laurent. Everyone was in a spin and whilst this mostly failed to materialise into a real edible product, it allowed everyone to momentarily become distracted from cake - and most importantly everyone was able to throw in puns about women 'eating up' designer labels.
POP Bakery
Returning to the real world, the sexiest replacement we've found comes in a lollipop-cake crossover. Nowhere near as terrible as it sounds, Pop Bakery creates genius cake balls on sticks with some fantastically trendy designs. "Eating cake with only one hand," you ask, astonished? Well, yes. And it's brilliant. The designs are fantastic from owls to pandas and flowers, to small families of Russian Dolls, but I've yet to get over the idea of having one bite of cake.
Vintage Confections on Etsy
And finally, for a cross-over in the other direction: cake flavoured lollipops.. A strange sort of concept, they're translucent and sticky vintage shaped lollies with all the flavour of cake and come in varieties of Carrot Cake, Angel Food, Chocolate Brownies, Cake batter, Brown Sugar, and Chocolate Chip Cookies. Very odd. The Vintage Confections make a whole host of non-cake flavoured lollies, which are all absolutely adorable (n.b. as far as sugary things go). Whilst they're all lovely and come in blue crab shapes, and brown mustaches, please don't ever feel inclined to mix and match a straw hat with a cowboy one.
Main image via Pink Sherbet's Flickr