Bake me, I'm yours

Jacinta Yu Lei-lei remembers when she couldn't sell a single cupcake at a street-fair stall in Yau Yat Chuen.

'There we were, with our buttercream and sprinkles, next to stands selling Chinese noodles and snacks,' she says. 'People had never seen this kind of dessert before, and we felt like Martians on Earth.'

But that was in 2004. Now cupcakes have never been so hot, bakers say.

Hong Kong took a while to catch on to them, says Yu, who runs baking and party supply store Complete Deelite. Cupcakes are as American as apple pie, but they only became hip when a Sex and the City episode featured New York's Magnolia Bakery and 'made them a posh item', says Yu. But despite the popularity of the TV series in fashionable Hong Kong, many of the city's trendies lacked their American counterparts' tradition and nostalgia for the cakes.

Many Asian palates weren't used to such a sweet dessert, says former banker Lachlan Campbell, who last December opened Babycakes, Hong Kong's first specialist cupcake bakery. So, his company adjusted its recipes to potential customers' tastes.

And when Complete Deelite's customers asked for a lower frosting-to-cake ratio, the bakers introduced Rainbow Bright, a vanilla cupcake iced with a thin layer of buttercream. Such ingredient adjustments seem to have worked. Hong Kong Chinese customers make up 40 per cent of Babycakes' business, and about half the clientele for Complete Deelite, which claims a 10-fold increase in business over the past four years.