Life and Leisure

Hello, cupcake

By Mike Peters (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-24 08:34

"I take a long time with my cakes," says Carol Chow, who is often teased by the local bakers on her staff. "They say they can make a cake in five minutes but I'm still working on the first one five hours later." Jonah Kessel / China Daily

Top: Twins Kiran (left) and Ariel think it's great that mom is in the cupcake business. Above: Custom cakes, such as this life-sized pair of Nike basketball shoes, challenge Chow's artistry and keeps the creative juices flowing. Provided to China Daily

Chinese-American Carol Chow takes flour, butter and sugar and turns it all into confections that are as pretty and tasty as they are fun to bake. Mike Peters licks the wooden spoon.

If Carol Chow had her way, you would be reading this story printed not in ink, but in chocolate. "I'm studying chocolate,?says the pert purveyor of sweets known to many Beijingers as "the cupcake lady? Her retail shop in Central Park, CC Sweets, has been open only a few weeks, but Chow is a longtime fixture at local art and design exhibitions, invariably arriving with a load of cheerily decorated cupcakes. She made a splash last year at a furniture exhibit, where the designs mimicked parts of the human anatomy. Chow complemented the rather erotic visuals around her with a PG-rated treat: A huge pair of lips sculpted in chocolate cake.

Today, her thoughts still turn to chocolate.

"I'm working with some artists who I hope will produce some limited-edition work for us," she says. "Think of painting with chocolate, chocolate calligraphy on paper "

Chocolate, she muses, would also be healthier for artists to work with than oil paints and cleaning solvents.

Chow's cupcakes make the medium the message, too - but the art of food isn't what got her interested at first.

"I didn't really get into baking until I came to Beijing about six years ago," she says. "And I couldn't figure out what was in the food here. Why was the bread often so very white? Why didn't 'cream' behave like cream when you cooked with it?

"After I started baking, I realized it was very creative," she says, patting a sugarcraft bird onto the rim of a birthday cake. "A lot of pastry chefs were artists."

That made the transition easy for Chow, a jewelry designer who once ran an Internet advertising agency in the United States.

Chow was born in Beijing, but moved to the US when she was five, growing up in New Jersey, studying art and art history at Brown University and living in New York for 20 years.

"I never thought I'd come back," she says, noting that her father died in the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). But despite the sorrow she carries from that time, she and her entrepreneur husband, Bill, saw new opportunity in China's capital in the past decade.

"Bill's American but speaks perfect Chinese, much better than mine," she says. Because he studied in Taiwan while a student at Middlebury, "he can read and write and has perfect pronunciation. I have a southern accent because of my mom," whose family came from Hainan Island.

So the two have settled into Beijing and now live above the CC Sweets bakery, much to the satisfaction of their artistic friends - and their twin girls, Kiran and Ariel.

"They are always planning their next birthday cake," she says, grinning at a snapshot of the cupcake-munching twins that sits on the counter.

"They had one for their 4th birthday and then 4 and a half - and they change their minds every day about what they want that cake to be. By the time they are 5 they may learn quarters - then we may need to make a 5-and-one-quarter birthday cake," she says, rolling her eyes and laughing. "So it's a way to teach them math, I guess."

It's also a way to get them to eat a little better.

"It's not like dessert is healthy to begin with," she says. "So you need to get quality when you eat them." And if she's feeding her own children, she adds, "I have to get good ingredients."

That wasn't what she found on her first food shopping forays in Beijing.

"Everything was made with this non-dairy 'cream' - you could spend 15 yuan and have enough to make four cakes. It was just weird and unhealthy. Chinese bakers can go to school without ever using real butter and cream."

While sweet-toothed expats familiar with cupcakes are an obvious market, Chow is betting that quality and food safety will attract upper-income and younger, educated Chinese.

A big part of Chow's formula is to make cupcakes less sweet - "it's more about the flavor of the ingredients than covering up everything with sugar." That fits the Chinese market well and even suits long-term expats, whose taste gradually changes once they get used to China's more savory than sweet cuisine.

And despite the temptation of chocolate, carrot, red-velvet, pumpkin, banana, chocolate-mint, chocolate-peanut-butter and sometimes tiramisu, Chow insists her rich delights usually don't inspire gluttony.

"When we eat something good, we usually don't eat as much of it. When we take time to eat and taste and enjoy, we're not just stuffing in fuel like we do with junk food."

Which is not to say people can't get passionate about those cupcakes.

"There was a woman who ordered a particular kind of cupcake but then didn't pick them up. We couldn't reach her," says Chow. "Her husband called later to say that his wife had gone into labor that afternoon, but he was on his way."

The man had tried to convince his wife that she would not feel like eating cupcakes, "but she told him, 'No, no, go get the cupcakes!'"

Chow heard later than the mom-to-be had two before being wheeled into the delivery room, and finished the box by the time she went home from the hospital.