Sunday, July 18, 2010

Butch baker sells cupcakes for manly men

A New York businessman is changing the image of the cupcake as a sweet treat for girls into a must for men. Former lawyer David Arrick has come up with the Butch Bakery, making cupcakes especially designed and baked for men. His £2.70 creations do not come in standard vanilla and chocolate flavours. "We have the beer, the beer run, which is a beer cupcake," he said.

"We've got a salted caramel cupcake, it's the salt and the sweet. They go great together. We've got a great banana, peanut butter with crushed bacon, so if you think about it, it's kind of like the Elvis sandwich, you know, peanut butter, bacon, and banana, we've got a cupcake that has that. We've got a cupcake that has whisky. It tastes like a B-52. We've got a coffee flavoured, coffee-infused, which is with some Kahlua, so a nice coffee cupcake. That's a huge hit for us."



The businessman said the idea came to him after he lost his job as a Wall Street lawyer in 2008. After months of unsuccessfully looking for work, he decided to try something new and after a little market research, decided to create cupcakes, but not the typical kind. "That's how Butch Bakery was born, I thought they are all very feminine and pink and a lot of them are frilly with jelly beans and sprinkles, and I thought I wanted to do something very different, and I decided to something with a masculine bent to it and that's how I came up with the idea," he explained. Butch Bakery markets itself as making "manly cupcakes for manly men," but the former lawyer said they would appeal to anybody who had a taste for something new.

"I think that we eat with our eyes first before our stomachs and I think that it's got to be visually appealing, and I wanted something that was going to have an impact from the beginning, right when you see it," he said. Business is growing fast. Since opening in November 2009, business has grown about 500% despite the economy with the bakery selling about 500 cupcakes a week. The aim is to quadruple that. "The response has been overwhelming, all around the world, media response from all around the world, I get orders from all around the world from as far away as Australia as a matter of fact," he said. Ironically, most of the customers are women.

With news video.

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