Cupcakes: Delicious, Ubiquitous, and Politically Correct

At farmers’ markets, cafes, Bewley’s, and bake shops; Ireland’s got the fever. They call them “cupcakes” here nowadays – not “fairy cakes,” like they used to. But, gracious, you wouldn’t catch someone using that dreadful archaic term nowadays; not since the Great Fairy Uprising of 2004. In the spring of that year, centuries of Irish-Fairy tension came to a head when thousands of fairies left their mounds in Clare to protest the humiliating tradition of branding tiny cakes “fairy cakes.” Much fairy dust was spilled, but in the end, the ugly term has been erased from the Hiberno-English lexicon. The American word “cupcake” was eventually adopted, because everybody knows that cups don’t have feelings.