Sweet Success: The World’s Biggest Cupcake

If you think about it, cupcakes are perfect for the modern world. They’re small, easy to make on an industrial scale as well as in small batches at home with the kids, the ingredients are relatively inexpensive, you can decorate them in a million different ways, and they fit perfectly in a lunch box!

Today, cupcakes are a global phenomenon. They sell millions per day and many more are made at home, and whatever name they’re known by – fairy cakes in the UK, and patty cakes in Australia, for example – the allure of the light sponge cake and the soft buttercream icing is hard to ignore!

But while their original intention was to be small, some are big. Very big. In fact one particular cupcake is the planet’s biggest cupcake. Before we get to the contenders for the largest cupcake in the world, let’s take a look at where they came from and how they got their name.

The origin of the cupcake dates back to 1796 when American writer Amelia Simmons mentioned a recipe for “a cake to be baked in small cups” in her cookbook American Cookery. However the small scrummy sponge didn’t get its name for another thirty-two years.

The first documented reference to a ‘cupcake’ was in 1828 by Eliza Leslie, a nineteenth century writer of household management and cook books, novels, short stories and newspaper articles. It appeared in the 1828 book ‘Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats’ and the name stuck.

In the USA they were also called 1234 cakes, because the ingredients for a batch were one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour and four eggs. Their popularity has been bolstered by dedicated cupcake shops, television shows, and social media platforms showcasing elaborate designs and innovative recipes. Cupcake towers have even been used to replace the traditional wedding cake!

But what about the world’s biggest cupcake?

Since the dawn of human civilisation, the quest to go further, faster and bigger has continued apace, and that includes vying for the title of the world’s biggest cupcake.

In 2008, celebrity chef Duff Goldman, from Food Network’s Ace of Cakes, made the world’s largest cupcake. The colossal confection had a diameter of 46 centimetres, and was 30 centimetres high. The frosting alone included over seven kilograms of butter and almost five kilograms of sugar. All told, the cupcake, baked for an American initiative aimed at ending childhood hunger, weighed in at a shade under 28 kilograms.

Just a year after Duff’s staggering sponge cake, the Merengue Bakery in the USA broke his record for the biggest cupcake in the world by baking a cupcake weighing an astonishing 555.2 kilograms. Ingredients included 91 kilograms each of flour, oil, butter and sugar, as well as 1,000 eggs!

It was 3.4 metres in diameter and 1.2 metres tall and was estimated to contain two million calories! Nicknamed The Queen, it was smothered in pink frosting to support the Susan G. Komen Foundation, one of America’s leading breast cancer charities.

The record for the largest cupcake in the world was broken again in 2011, this time by Georgetown Cupcake, a chain of gourmet cupcake shops in Washington, DC, Maryland and Atlanta.

The cupcake weighed 1,176.6 kilograms, with a diameter of more than 1.4 metres and a height of just over 90 centimetres. It was so big, the oven and pan were custom-made, with the pan alone reported to have weighed over 300 kilograms.

The ingredients included around 363 kilograms of sugar and the same of butter, almost half a tonne of frosting, more than 300 kilograms of chocolate as well as thousands of eggs.

The cupcake required industrial equipment to mix and bake the batter. The baking process itself took several hours due to the sheer size of the cupcake and it couldn’t be undertaken in their shop ovens so was cooked at the company’s distribution headquarters in Sterling, Virginia. After it was officially weighed and certified by Guinness World Records, it was cut into more manageable pieces and served to the public during a charity event.

The world’s biggest cupcakes don’t just highlight the skill involved in baking at such scale, but also the lengths people go to in order to push baking boundaries and raise money for charitable causes. Yet whether enjoyed as a simple treat or marveled at in record-breaking sizes, one thing that’s not in doubt is that cupcakes continue to tantalise the taste buds of people young and old all over the world.