A Toronto bakery has made a cupcake worth $900. I can't say if it's delicious - though given that it has coffee beans in it I suspect I would not enjoy it at all - but the cupcake itself is barely even relevant. It has not been made with pure flavor in mind, it was instead put together to be as decadent as possible. Does edible gold taste good? Not really, though my only experience with it has been Goldschlager. Is eating gold something that you do entirely for the sheer thrill of doing something so absurd? Yes, ask the guy who drank Goldschlager once.
This particular cupcake was made for a man who wanted to give his wife something for her birthday featuring her favorite ingredients. For the pastry chefs involved, it was a chance to put their skills to the test and produce the most elaborate, complicated and skill-testing creation they could possibly put together. For the recipient of the cake, it was dessert, but only a small one because it's a cupcake. For the rest of the world, you will inevitably get a split between the people who are aghast that someone could spend so much on a cupcake and those who have dreams of making even more elaborate and absurd baked goods.
I think it's more a thrill for the people making the cake than it is for the people ordering it. If I had a $900 cupcake I would eat it, and I would remember it as the time I ate an extremely expensive dessert. For the people making the cake, they have an opportunity to put all their skills to the test, use ingredients that are too expensive to justify in any other situation, and they will essentially be at the cutting edge of their profession. At a certain point, it becomes more than just a cake, it becomes art, albeit temporary art because cake works best when you eat it rather than when you sit and admire it. No matter how beautiful the work of a pastry chef, at the end of the day it must be cut apart and consumed by the hungry crowd, and their crowning achievement is when there is none left over.
But when you look at the end result of this cupcake, or at the end result of any of these absurdly decadent desserts - all of which have edible gold in there, for reasons mentioned earlier - I begin to wonder if the people eating them wouldn't be happier with just getting a good cake of a much less absurd description. Admittedly, as someone who doesn't like coffee, this particular cake is going to be difficult for me to judge, but in general when these over the top desserts come out at a certain point they're more about being expensive than good. I would rather have a cupcake made out of normal ingredients than one filled with kona coffee beans and champagne. I certainly never need to eat edible gold again.
These pastries exist as an anecdote, nothing more, which is almost sad considering the work that has gone into them. The chefs involved spend a great deal of effort into making this a cake worthy of the price, something that people can be proud of consuming. But, at the end of the day, it's going to be a quick anecdote at a party. People will tell their friends that they had a $900 cupcake, there will be questions about the ingredients or whether it was worth it. In the end, all that effort, and it'll just exist so someone can brag that they can spend nearly a grand on pastries. That seems sad to me.
