Stephen Jardine: Cupcakes reveal more than you’d think about the worldwide financial crisis

I declined the offer on the basis that, like everyone else, I was about to have lunch.

Then came the sting in the tail. This wasn’t just an ordinary cupcake, this was a genius marketing gimmick to interest me in getting a mortgage. That’s right, in exchange for entering the labyrinthian worm-hole that is shifting your mortgage, you get a tiny sponge covered in too much butter icing. If I’d been offered £1,000 and a date with Halle Berry in exchange for moving mortgages I would have asked for time to think about it and a cooling off period. But a cupcake for a mortgage, really?

You can see some vague, muddled thinking in the background. Mortgages are boring but cupcakes aren’t. There was a time when they were stylish – the cake of choice for Carrie Bradshaw and the Sex and the City girls – but they should have stayed in Manhattan. Instead, like crayfish, they came here and tried to take over. The poor British fairy cake was swept aside by the big, blousy American cupcake that always promises so much more than it delivers.

The cupcake has become one of the most fetishised food items of our times, going from children’s party gimmick to fashion accessory. Women who run screaming from cheesecake, queue up for cupcakes in the vain hope that the usual rules about sugar, butter and flour equalling calories magically do not apply. Would Sarah Jessica Parker really be a size zero on a diet of chocolate peanut butter cupcakes and cosmopolitan cocktails?

Inevitably, there has been a backlash and the internet is filled with anti-cupcake forums and web groups. There is even an “I Hate Cupcakes” Facebook page devoted to the cause. Leading the case for the patisserie prosecution is the only Scottish finalist in the first series of The Great British Bake Off.

“I loathe cupcakes,” says Lea Harris. “I don’t like to make them, I don’t like to eat them. The frosting just hides a mundane sponge and, in my limited experience of eating them, I find them dry. They are over sweet, over priced and over here”.

Guilty as charged. Our best hope is that the fashion for cupcakes will end as quickly as it started. The reality is, fashion and food don’t sit well together as rows of skinny models will testify. From sea buckthorn to coconut water, from sous vide to seawater, trends in cooking come and go, but taste is constant and cupcakes just taste dull.

They also deserve an Asbo because cupcakes are anti-social. There is none of the joy that goes with sharing slices from a proper cake before moving on to second helpings. Instead, the solitary cupcake sits there all alone, waiting to disappoint. It is the Gordon Brown of the cake world. You never want a second one.

So, instead of being an irresistible incentive to switch to a new mortgage product, the cupcake is actually disappointing and past-its-sell-by-date. The sad thing is that no one in the vast marketing apparatus of the bank spotted that. If these are the brains trying to extract us from a worldwide banking crisis then we’d better get used to staying right where we are.

And, as promised at the start, that’s how we got to be where we are today. Next week – the role Jaffa Cakes play in the Middle East crisis.