Stop the war on cupcakes!

When George Mason elementary in Alexandria, Va., banned cupcakes earlier this year, many parents were taken aback, viewing it as one more case of bureaucracy gone wild. After all, the school cupcake has been an American institution for decades.

Blame it on federally mandated "wellness policies." Technically, Alexandria's policy prohibits only the use of food as a reward or punishment, but some principals took that to include birthday cupcakes as well.

The assault on the cupcake has more commonly taken the form of indicting it as an agent of childhood obesity. "They can bring carrots," a school administrator in Orange County, Calif., told The Los Angeles Times, and, no, her name is not Marie Antoinette.

All this has produced a pro-cupcake backlash. Last year, the Texas Legislature, ever in the forefront of backward-looking policy, passed -- seriously, folks -- the "Safe Cupcake Amendment," guaranteeing the parental right to deliver junk food to the classroom, a right enshrined in the Bill of Rights, if we recall correctly.

Cupcake chic

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As the Washington Post noted in describing the cupcake's plight, it's not so much the kids who are upset as the parents. But there's a flip side to the assault on the cupcake. At this point, The Morning File, always on the dull edge, apologizes for failing to note that the cupcake has emerged as a chic food in recent years.

Entire blogs are devoted to cupcake culture. Johnny Cupcakes' "Make Cupcakes Not War" T-shirts are selling at ridiculous prices. Cupcakes have been celebrated on "Sex in the City" and "Saturday Night Live." And cupcake-torn Alexandria has just joined the growing number of cities with high-end cupcake-specialty bakeries.

Yes, even Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh will soon catch up with the hipster cities, skipping the usual 10-year lag. We learned this from on-the-ball blog pittsburghdish.typepad.com. Dozen Cupcakes in Squirrel Hill is aiming for a Dec. 22 opening. Co-owner James Gray told cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com:

"When I moved to Pittsburgh six months ago I saw that it was a city going through some big changes culturally. I recognized that now was the time to start a business like this. I want to bring a bakery to Pittsburgh like the ones you find in Chicago or New York."

The shop is on Murray near Forbes next to Cold Stone Creamery.

Hostess memories

At the center of the cupcake revival are boomer memories of simpler times and childhood. Or perhaps of Cupcake Cassidy and her twin 44s.

"I can almost smell the artificial cream filling -- so sweet it escapes the sealed plastic wrapper. When I was a kid, I hated cake and loved frosting. I used to peel the Hostess frosting off the top and nibble the little curly-ques, which crunched between my teeth. Then I tore bits of the chocolate and let them dissolve on my tongue. Totally gross, I know. But, at the time, pure heaven."

littlemotors.org/antifreeze

Home-made cupcake memories

NPR commentator and author Hollis Gillespie:

"When my sister and I were kids and used to sell the cupcakes door-to-door, there was this very heavy elderly neighbor who was always good for at least half a dozen. We used to make fun of her because even her cats were fat.

"Then one day we came to the door and her grown daughter told us that her mother was in the hospital because of diabetes, and that her mother never even ate the cupcakes we sold her, but fed them to her cats instead.

"I always think back about how nice that woman was, to buy our cupcakes when she couldn't even eat them, and I've never made fun of a fat person since (pretty much)."

cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com

No stamp of approval here

The Morning File is among the major media outlets to have reported on the strange-but-true phenomenon that allows anyone to put anything on a real stamp -- your kid, your dog, your Aunt Bertha -- through government-approved private vendors.

Anything? Not quite, as blogger Shana Weiss, huffingtonpost.com, found out.

She ordered two sets of stamps -- one of her 5-year old in his "Happy Feet" ski hat and one set of her 8-year-old in his pricey "Make Cupcakes Not War" T-shirt. When the package arrived, it contained only the stamps for the 5-year old. The response from the vendor PhotoStamps: The order was rejected because it didn't meet their content guidelines, meaning it contained "a political statement, a religious symbol, a focus on alcohol, etc."

"I was stunned," wrote Ms. Weiss. "I was being censored. I was outraged. The photo is not obscene; it's not abusive; it's not sexually suggestive nor defamatory. It's a picture of a kid expressing his support for sugary sweets and peace. Could they really do this?"

She makes a good point, but as we've asked before: Is a country that allows you to put pictures of your kids on real postage stamps still a real country?