Cup cakes - it's all about the look

Palazzo Decadence D’or Cupcake – $750

Made of Louis XIII de Remy Martin Cognac (bottled in 1900), gold flakes, Tahitian gold-vanilla caviar and Palmira Single Estate chocolate, the Palazzo Decadence D’or Cupcake retails for $750.

My sister has the challenge of making cupcakes for her adopted daughter's wedding next year and she is already worrying about it. The wedding is not until March. I doubt she is going to do anything as elaborate as this, but I do think the item on the left demonstrates how much cup cakes have come to be associated with fancy, fancy looking cakes. This one is from Las Vegas. Well where else you would think, but it actually is number 8 on a list of the ten most expensive cupcakes in the world. Here are a couple of others - not the top ones which were basically cupcakes decorated with diamonds.

I just had to show you them because they are just so amazing. The one on the left is:

Bloomsbury’s Golden Phoenix Cupcake – $1.000

Priced at $1.000, the Bloomsbury’s Golden Phoenix Cupcake ranks #6 on our top 10 list of the world’s most expensive cupcakes.

Also known as The Golden Phoenix, this cupcake features an amount of 23 carats of edible gold sheets, Rachel’s organic butter, Doves organic flour from UK, Premium Amedei Porcelena cocoa from Italy, gold Ugandan vanilla beans.

and the one on the right is:

Food Network UK’s Luxe Gold Cupcake – $1.227

Wrapped in a 24-carat edible gold leaf, the Luxe Gold Cupcake made by Food Network looks very exquisite!

The treat also contains a small amount of butter cream made with Chateau Yquem, Hawaiian tea, chocolate and jams made of peach and champagne.

The point is though that the cupcake itself underneath all that gold is more or less a normal cup cake. And that's the thing about all cup cakes isn't it? It's basically a pretty plain little cake that you then have fun decorating. So, great for kids to play with and also great for celebrations like weddings and anniversaries because you can let your creative juices run riot. And if you feel daunted by all of this then there are people out there ready and willing to charge you quite a bit for the privilege.

Here for example is a box from Laurent (well I think it's Laurent). I have no idea what this particular box costs. I would have to order it before I found out how much. However, I did find that Cupcake Central in Melbourne - apparently one of our best cupcake shops - sell theirs for $4.50 each. That's not cheap. So these are luxury items, and I bet there weill be a few at the Melbourne Cup next week.

However, never fear, places like Women's Weekly and Taste.com will give you a basic recipe and there are YouTube videos galore to show you how to decorate them. And Aldi, from time to time, and anywhere else really - including your local supermarket have tons of things to decorate with - both the tools and the icing and stuff. You an keep it simple or relatively easily whip up something entertaining for your next kids' party.

It won't be me though. I don't particularly like them. The taste of the cakes is often dry and crumbly and the icing is somewhat too sweet, not to mention that they are messy to eat sometimes. It's also something that I think has flourished in ever more extreme forms, from America I think, over the last few decades. When I was a child the most extravagant form of cupcake we had was butterfly cakes, where you cut the top off, cut it in half, spread a bit of butter cream on top and then stuck the two halves in like wings. We were impressed.

But I think it would take a little more to impress a child these days. I don't think kids' birthday parties were as competitive in those days, but maybe they were and I just didn't notice.