Cupcake Ideas – Interview With The Author Of “The Cupcake Queen”
Whether you are looking for a way to save money on your wedding cake, or just want the most amazing cake you can find, this article will give you some ideas to plan your perfect wedding cake.
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Original Post on: cakespy.com
Title: Batter Chatter: Interview with Heather Hepler, Author of The Cupcake Queen
Sure, we do a lot of interviews here with bakers and pastry chefs–but what about the other people who create sweet art that might not be edible? For instance, the cupcake novelist? Enter Heather Hepler, author of the newly released novel The Cupcake Queen
CakeSpy: First off: what was the last baked good you ate (cupcake or otherwise)?
Heather Hepler: The last baked good I ate was a piece of homemade challah. I love baking bread, but my usual fare is usually dessert… cakes, pies, cookies, and of course cupcakes. But, I will tell you a secret. I have a hard time with cupcakes because it’s hard to have just a little more. I mean, with a cake or a pie, you can sneak a sliver more, but with cupcakes, you have to commit to a second cupcake. And suddenly you’re the “woman who ate two cupcakes”!
CS: Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way–please, tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? How did you get into writing novels?
HH: I’m from everywhere it seems. I’ve moved around a lot in my life. I spent most of my childhood in Texas, but I moved out west when I was sixteen. I then spent the next fifteen years bouncing along the West Coast (Nevada, Oregon, California, Alaska). I loved living near the mountains in Nevada and near the water in California and Oregon. Alaska was beautiful, but so cold. I then headed east – way east. I lived in a tiny town on the coast in Maine for several years. Now, I’m back in Texas. This is the longest I’ve lived in any one place since I was a child. I’m starting to feel the moving urge growing.
I start writing novels at the urging of a friend. I tried it for fun really, which was the best way. If I had thought then that someone might want to publish what I’d written someday, I would have probably frozen.
CS: In your novel, the heroine Penny and her mother move from NYC to a small town to open a cupcake shop. Why a cupcake shop?
HH: Other than the aforementioned issue, I love cupcakes. I love that they can be decorated so beautifully that they can only be called edible art, but I also love the ones you see at the elementary school bake sales with a splotch of icing and a dusting of sprinkles. I also loved the idea of a shop that only sold cupcakes, like it held them in such high regard that nothing else was needed. Of course I wrote this way before the recent cupcake boom. That my book came out in the middle of it is one of those life mysteries. Pure serendipity.
CS: I suspect that cupcakes may be symbolic in your book. Am I right?
HH: The cupcakes are both symbolic and well, just cupcakes. They become for Penny, a girl dealing with the meltdown of her life, a way of making sense of things. As her life becomes increasingly chaotic and out of her control, her cupcakes become more important. It’s her way of making some beautiful out of the pain she’s in… her way of whistling in the dark.
CS: Here’s an open-ended question: what do cupcakes mean to you?
HH: Cupcakes are what you want them to be. They can be fun (a bucket of faux popcorn or a fish swimming in its bowl) or beautiful (a Van Gogh or a basket of flowers) or nostalgic (a yellow cupcake with chocolate frosting from a can and a mound of rainbow jimmies) or simply a way of sharing something personal with someone else. There’s something really wonderful about baking and sharing what you’ve made with someone you love. I know it’s probably cliché and corny and all that, but there’s a certain beauty in a cupcake’s simplicity.
Read the entire interview – RSS news source: http://www.cakespy.com/2009/10/batter-chatter-interview-with-heather.html
