Flashback 2011: 'You get a little heartbroken'

      A central hazard of aging is the risk of beginning to notice what isn't there more than you notice what is. I pondered  this last week, when I was downtown (and wrote a post about thinking the Harlan J. Berk coin and antiquity store had vanished). It wasn't just that. My general mood was, I felt like I was walking through a Ghost City of places now gone. Such as this blank storefront on Madison Street, which I had written about a couple of times when it was a tiny but scrappy cupcake shop. I have sympathy for small fry flogging their dying dreams, particularly if they are battling behemoths. The original headline was "Corporate cupcake giant moves in on 2 tough cookies." If you make it to the end, I provide an update.

     People come into the Cupcake Counter all day long, looking for cupcakes. Some even buy them at the tiny shop on Madison Street.
     Others are just asking for directions to Crumbs Bake Shop, a New York cupcake chain that opened in Chicago at the end of December. 

     They haven’t far to go; it’s right across the street from the Cupcake Counter — just turn around and walk out the door, having bought nothing, leave the little bakery that Samantha Wood and her mother, Holly Sjo, began in 2009 and keep afloat by working grueling 16-hour days, turn left, go 60 paces, crossing Franklin Street, and there you are at the 34th Crumbs branch nationwide.
     “Your spirit ...” says Wood. “You get a little heartbroken.”
     The Cupcake Counter, 229 W. Madison, is perhaps the smallest retail establishment downtown. The storefront is 9 feet wide, the total space, including the kitchen in back, is 290 square feet. For Valentine’s Day it is decorated like a kindergarten, with big red hearts cut out of construction paper.
     Crumbs is more than twice the size, a difference also reflected in its products. It’s decorated with a lovely golden graphic of a jester juggling cupcakes.

   Cupcake Counter cupcakes weigh about 2¾ ounces and look exactly like the cupcakes your mother would bake and bring to your first-grade classroom in a tinfoil-lined shoebox to celebrate your birthday. The icing can be spare — sometimes it doesn’t even cover the cupcake top, but leaves a gap of bare cake rimming the crinkly paper wrapping.
      Decoration might be a single tiny red candy heart, set directly in the center. I would describe Cupcake Counter cupcakes as simple, classic cupcakes with a certain quiet dignity; solemn cupcakes, maybe even a little sorrowful; cupcakes as Wayne Thiebaud would paint them.
     Sometimes only a handful are on display.
     Across the street at Crumbs is a different story altogether. The display case is jammed with cupcakes, ranging from 1-ounce minis to the “Colossal Crumb” intended to feed eight people. The “signature” cupcakes are 7-ounce, 500-calorie behemoths the size and shape of grapefruits, domed high with icing, studded with candy, drenched in chocolate, crusted with sprinkles. Circus-like cupcakes. Mardi Gras cupcakes.
      “Most people don’t eat them by themselves,” said Crumbs district manager Sara Fina. “They share them, because you want to try everything.”
     Its “library of varieties” are produced at an outside bakery. “We give them the recipes,” said Fina, adding that Crumbs plans to open four more outposts in the Chicago area, the latest squalls in a cupcake downpour.
      “Cupcakes, cupcakes, cupcakes,” said Sarah Levy, founder of Sarah’s Pastries & Candies, a Chicago bakery. “We are definitely being bombarded. You think it’s going to be gone but it’s still going.”
      Levy said high-end cupcake boutiques first got recognition with New York’s Magnolia Bakery in “Sex and the City” and Sprinkles in Beverly Hills.
      “Lines out the door,” Levy said.
      Sprinkles opened its first shop in Chicago last July. Magnolia is planning to open here this spring.
     Cupcake Counter cupcakes are $3 apiece; Crumbs’ signature cupcakes are $3.75. I bought a few from each store to take home, taste-test and compare, and here my David-and-Goliath story falls apart.
      Though Cupcake Counter chocolate icing has a delicate cocoa note I savored, there was no night-and-day difference. The made-from-scratch-by-mom cake and the made-by-some-faceless-contractor cake tasted pretty much the same, and my family preferred Crumbs, which does give 250 percent more cupcake for 25 percent more in price.
     Not that there aren’t reasons beyond cupcakes to patronize the Cupcake Counter.
     “It was always a dream to do a business together,” said Wood. “Mom went to culinary school; I worked in advertising. That was our dream, to do something little and have it be real. We never had the interest to have 10 locations.”
      They have a tough enough time running one.
     “Food retail is so laborious,” she said, noting they arrive at 3 or 4 a.m. and stay until 7:30 p.m..
     “That’s a day,” she said.
     As for Crumbs.
     “You want to believe that people can see through it,” she said.
     Wood looked tired. What are the chances that she and her mother will hold up against a national chain?
     “Mom and I are fighters, we will never not survive,” she said. “Someone else in our shoes, I would really be concerned. We will not compromise our integrity.”
     Her mother has not stepped foot in Crumbs since it opened.
     “Why would I?” said Holly Sjo. “It’s of no concern. I’ve been to them in Beverly Hills and in New York and they’re all the same.”
     Is she concerned because they’re across the street?
     “Concerned?” she said. “A little disappointed. We have completely different products. We make everything by scratch, by hand. We do it just like your mother would do for your birthday. Every single thing we sell goes through my hands. It’s a very long day, but for me, I have no interest to do it any other way.
     “I think our recipes are different, our visual appeal, our personal commitment, you will sense that, if you were actually lucky enough to have a mom or grandma who did that. That’s what a baker is supposed to do.”
     — Originally published Feb. 13, 2011

     

    Update: The Cupcake Counter won. All 65 Crumbs stores went out of business in 2014. Sprinkles closed its Chicago operations last year. Magnolia Bakery still has a State Street location, as well as outlets in New York, California, India, Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey and the Philippines. 

     But what giant cupcakes could not kill, COVID did, and the Cupcake Counter went out of business in April, 2020. Samantha Wood moved to Florida where she formed the Sjo Agency — named for her mother — which does support work for UHNW, or "ultra high net worth" individuals.