Magnolia Bakery - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Magnolia Bakery is a bakery

Bakery

A bakery is an establishment which produces and sells flour-based food baked in an oven such as bread, cakes, pastries and pies. Some retail bakeries are also cafés, serving coffee and tea to customers who wish to consume the baked goods on the premises.-See also:*Baker*Cake...

opened in 1996 at 401 Bleecker Street

Bleecker Street

Bleecker Street is a street in New York City's Manhattan borough. It is perhaps most famous today as a Greenwich Village nightclub district. The street is a spine that connects a neighborhood today popular for music venues and comedy, but which was once a major center for American bohemia.Bleecker...

, on the corner of West 11th Street in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

, New York City. An uptown shop opened at 200 Columbus Avenue, on the corner of West 69th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in January 2008. A location also exists near Rockefeller center at 1240 Avenue of the Americas, and yet another in the dining concourse of Grand Central Station, which opened in February of 2010. The bakery is known for its famous dessert

Dessert

In cultures around the world, dessert is a course that typically comes at the end of a meal, usually consisting of sweet food. The word comes from the French language as dessert and this from Old French desservir, "to clear the table" and "to serve." Common Western desserts include cakes, biscuits,...

treats, including its cupcake

Cupcake

A cupcake is a small cake designed to serve one person, frequently baked in a small, thin paper or aluminum cup...

s and old-fashioned Depression era icebox cake

Icebox Cake

An icebox cake , zebra cake , or chocolate ripple cake/log is a dessert consisting of whipped cream and chocolate wafers. The back-of-the-box recipe on Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers indicates that the wafers are stacked to form a log with whipped cream cementing them together, and then the log...

s.

Magnolia bakery opened in July 1996 with Allysa Torey and Jennifer Appel as co-owners. They had three employees: Kathryn McCann (who was originally hired to be the bread baker), William (who washed dishes) and Avi (barista/counter guy). They offered four kinds of bread along with both cinnamon rolls and whole wheat maple walnut rolls during the first week of operation. Making bread proved to be impractical due to time and space constraints. Southern-raised Kathryn stayed on, however, to bake cakes and pastries, helping Allysa with icing cakes and testing recipes with her late at night. The cupcakes were Allysa's brainchild that resulted because when they would make 6" coconut cakes (instead of the usual 9"), there was extra batter going to waste. Thus, the cupcakes were born in early fall of 1996. They were originally only vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream icing tinted pink...the same as the icing that was on the nicknamed "Barbie Cake" of the time. They were baked in the afternoons and iced at night when the bakery was officially closed. There would be many people (mostly guys heading to Christopher Street) walking by late at night and when Allysa would tell them the bakery was closed, they would beg for just a cupcake. She obliged. Thus the craze began.

Magnolia Bakery was originally envisioned as just a nice little neighborhood bakery that would be open from about 8am-6pm. That plan changed quickly due to demand. The first summer the bakery was open, its air conditioner wasn't working and the 100 degree kitchen was too hot for many first-time visitors.

The bakery is credited with starting a 1990s

1990s

File:1990s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: The Hubble Space Telescope floats in space after it was taken up in 1990; American F-16s and F-15s fly over burning oil fields and the USA Lexie in Operation Desert Storm, also known as the 1991 Gulf War; The signing of the Oslo Accords on...

"cupcake craze". The Magnolia Bakery's owner, Allysa Torey, along with former co-owner Jennifer Appel, published a book in 1999 entitled The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook: Old-Fashioned Recipes from New York's Sweetest Bakery.

In 2000, co-owner Jennifer Appel parted ways with Torey and opened Buttercup Bake Shop in the Midtown East section of Manhattan. Allysa Torey (otherwise known by her given name Lisa Salvatore) sold The Magnolia Bakery to new owners, Steve and Tyra Abrams. As of January 1, 2007, she has agreed to stay on as a consultant for an unspecified amount of time.

On July 11, 2007, the bakery was shut down by the New York Department of Health for not having enough sinks, a missing door handle, a missing light cover, and several mouse droppings and fruit flies in its garbage area. The bakery fixed all of these problems and reopened within a week.

In 2008, Magnolia Bakery opened a second store at 200 Columbus Avenue at 69th Street. A third location was opened at 49th and Avenue of Americas. The fourth Magnolia Bakery is located in the lower level of Grand Central Terminal

Grand Central Terminal

Grand Central Terminal —often incorrectly called Grand Central Station, or shortened to simply Grand Central—is a terminal station at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States...

. The company has revealed it plans to expand no further in New York City after this opening.

Appearances in popular culture

The exterior of the bakery downtown, as well as its cupcake

Cupcake

A cupcake is a small cake designed to serve one person, frequently baked in a small, thin paper or aluminum cup...

s, were featured in Lazy Sunday
Lazy Sunday
"Lazy Sunday" is a song and short video by American comedy troupe The Lonely Island, released on December 17, 2005, broadcast on Saturday Night Live as the second Digital Short...

, a Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live is a live American late-night television sketch comedy and variety show developed by Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol. The show premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title of NBC's Saturday Night.The show's sketches often parody contemporary American culture...

digital short broadcast in December 2005. The bakery was also featured on Sex and the City
Sex and the City
Sex and the City is an American television comedy-drama series created by Darren Star and produced by HBO. Broadcast from 1998 until 2004, the original run of the show had a total of ninety-four episodes...

, in the film Prime
Prime (film)
Prime is a 2005 American romantic comedy film starring Uma Thurman, Meryl Streep and Bryan Greenberg. It was written and directed by Ben Younger...

, in which one of the characters throws Magnolia pies at his ex-girlfriends, and in The Devil Wears Prada
The Devil Wears Prada (film)
The Devil Wears Prada is a 2006 comedy-drama film, a loose screen adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel of the same name. It stars Anne Hathaway as Andrea Sachs, a recent college graduate who goes to New York City and gets a job as a co-assistant to powerful and demanding fashion magazine...

, in which the character Andy says at one point that she needs to get to the bakery to pick something up for her boyfriend. The sitcom Spin City
Spin City
Spin City is an American sitcom television series that aired from September 17, 1996 until April 30, 2002 on the ABC network. Created by Gary David Goldberg and Bill Lawrence, the show was based on a fictional local government running New York City, and originally starred Michael J. Fox as Mike...

also has Charlie Sheen's character bringing Magnolia Cupcakes to Heather Locklear's character. On October 16 2008, Conan O'Brien bought a cupcake for each member of his audience during a taping of Late Night. It was also briefly mentioned in the third season of Veronica Mars

Veronica Mars

Veronica Mars is an American television series created by Rob Thomas. The series premiered on September 22, 2004, during television network UPN's final two years, and ended on May 22, 2007, after a season on UPN's successor, The CW Television Network. Veronica Mars was produced by Warner Bros...

, the title character affectionately mentioning a picture of her father "stuffing cupcakes in [his] face at Magnolia Bakery."

External links

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