Cupcake crazies

CEBU, Philippines - Sugar, spice and everything nice. These are just among the ingredients to make those perfect sweet little things—cupcakes!

For many of you who possess a sweet tooth, those cakes with foamy icings and colourful embellishments on top can be very irresistible. In fact, this heavenly treat will leave you and your taste buds craving for more!

Now those scrumptious mini cakes are taking over Cebu, turning on the frenzy, and it seems that they are not going anywhere. Cupcake stores are prettily mushrooming in Cebu’s metro hub.

Typically, a cupcake is a small cake baked in a cup-shaped container and typically iced. They are often served during special occasions, including birthdays, parties, and anniversaries.  Well, for some people, they have become more than an occasional treat. For them, cupcakes become part of their weekly, if not daily, diet.

Happy Pill

“Cupcakes make me happy; they’re like my own calculator. It helps dissolve my worries,” said Chriselda Seron, 21, a mass communications student.

Seron’s way of coping with her troubles and stress is eating cupcakes. Her addiction to these little pleasures every time she feels sad prompts her to go straight to a pastry store and order her favourite red velvet cupcake.

“I don’t know but whenever I’m feeling down, I crave for sweets. The good thing is, there’s a cupcake shop just right across our street,” she said.

The Study Buddy

For a medical technology student who finds a hard time reading and memorizing piles of medical terms and procedures, Rikka Sharmaine Ungria, 19, treats cupcakes as a way to lessen the mental drain.

“I have heard a lot of people saying eating sweets are a great help when studying. They say sugar helps in remembering. So I thought, why not give it a try?” she said.

For almost three years now, Ungria goes to different cupcake stores to study out. It has become her regular routine, which is effective for her since most cupcake shops have a study-friendly atmosphere; they are quieter and more peaceful.

A Kid’s Friend

Children ranging from ages one to five are really hard to handle. Likewise, they can also be hard to feed. They run around, play with every little thing they see, do anything just to ignore eating. Christine Gaugano Sanes, a mother of two, found a way to calm down his two-year-old son Salv with cupcakes.

When Salv’s uncle brought home cupcakes one morning, Salv kept pointing at the table. So she brought him there and Salv sat down and ate the sweets. That was when she knew Salv loves cupcakes and, at the same time, that was when she found an ally to calm her son during his times of tantrums.

The Bridge

Who would have thought that cupcakes would bring up together two people in love? Well, it happened to Jessie Mae Barete and Eric Quilala.

Barete and Quilala has been a couple for about a year now. Barete shared that they already knew each other; they even often see each other’s faces since they study at the same school. But they never talked not until one rainy afternoon of December 2011.

“It was raining so I decided to wait for it to stop at a nearby cupcake shop. As I was sipping my drink and reading my notes, he came to me and asked if he could share the table. Since I know him by face, I agreed and we began to talk,” Barete said.

After the rain stopped and it’s time to go home, Quilala then asked for her number. Sending text messages, dating, and online chatting at the same place began and then few months later, they became a couple.

In these cases, it can be said that the best things in life are really sweets. So grab your own piece of cupcake now. Maybe through it, you can find a new chapter to your life story.

DID YOU KNOW? That cupcakes may be a healthier choice than a muffin.

As Tamara Duker Freuman, an American registered dietitian and New York State licensed Certified Dietitian-Nutritionist points out in one of her articles, “In our topsy-turvy world, however, it is possible and even likely that your store-bought muffin has more calories than your standard cupcake. Your average muffin from, say, a leading chain of cafe-bakeries, is 5.5 ounces and has 511 calories; its average cupcake is 3 ounces and 356 calories.”  (FREEMAN)