Today is Barbra Streisand’s 83rd birthday. I hope she gets the cupcake her heart desires.
Apparently, she’s still searching for it. We’ll return to that in a moment. First, there’s an essential point to recognize.
Streisand changed the cupcake world. Humanity’s appetite for premium gourmet cupcakes and the universality of the Main Street cupcake shop stem from Streisand’s action. She discovered Sprinkles Cupcakes soon after it opened in Beverly Hills in 2005. Before the year ended, Streisand had tasted the luxury cupcakes and sent some to her friend Oprah, who shared Streisand’s delight. Winfrey summoned the cupcakes for her studio audience and praised them on air in a February 2006 episode of her talk show. Cupcake pandemonium ensued. There was overwhelming demand for Sprinkles and copycat bakeries sprung up in every corner of the globe sufficiently developed to have ovens and ingredients.
This sparked a relationship between Sprinkles and Streisand, consummated with the Barbra Streisand, an off-menu vanilla cupcake with chocolate ganache. Sprinkles founder Candace Nelson sets the scene in The Sprinkles Baking Book.
“I will never forget meeting Barbra Streisand for the first time at an Academy Awards party. Barbra was an icon. Barbra was a legend. And Barbra was… a Sprinkles customer! I knew she loved our cupcakes, but I wasn’t prepared for her depth of knowledge when it came to food. And when she began talking about specific dessert techniques from Joy of Cooking recipes, I was equally blown away by her passion for baking. She told me how much she loved our vanilla cupcakes, and asked us to create a thin chocolate ganache glaze reminiscent of one she made at home using a melted semisweet chocolate bar. This became a special ‘off the menu’ flavor we made only when Barbra called. Barbra was also instrumental in introducing us to Oprah Winfrey. Not long after we opened, she had a dozen Sprinkles cupcakes delivered to Oprah in Santa Barbara. Soon after, Oprah invited us to be on her show. Once the episode aired, we had lines around the block that seemed to never end. We sent Barbra a picture of that winding customer line, inscribed with a quote from Oprah herself: ‘Look at what you started!’ Thank you a million times over, Barbra.”
The concept has lived in Streisand’s memory since childhood. In her memoir My Name is Barbra, the artist recalls a nostalgic cake from summer camp.
“The only thing to look forward to was Friday night, when you could get a great piece of kosher cake . . . yellow cake with dark chocolate icing that I’ve been searching for ever since . . .,” she writes. Pages later, she notes, “I didn’t cook but I liked to bake . . . I was always looking to replicate that yellow cake I loved at the Bais Yaakov summer camp . . . Fischer’s cupcakes came the closest.”
I was curious about Fischer and went to investigate. Visiting the 76-year-old Upper West Side grocer, I learned the cupcakes are a special order item.
Though the frosting isn’t ganache, I sampled the flavor combination at the new West Village flagship of Empire Cake.
Streisand wrote the memoir—and the “searching for ever since” phrase—after co-creating the Sprinkles flavor. It would seem the namesake Barbra Streisand cupcake didn’t suffice to quell the search.
Andrea Adleman | Cupcakologist 