Aunt Butchie's to Bring Cupcakes and a "Little Bit of Brooklyn" to Manhattan
It looks like the new year will bring new cupcakes to Manhattan: Aunt Butchie's, the Brooklyn-based bakery with four locations throughout the city, is opening a cupcake shop on the corner of 27th Street and Seventh Avenue.
clevercupcakes/flickr The cupcake army marches on.
"We're actually trying a new concept," says Sean Rich, one of the partners behind Aunt Butchie's Cupcakes. "This is the first Aunt Butchie's cupcake store. We're taking our great cake recipes and flipping them into cupcakes."
Rich says he's hoping to open the store, located in a former Yolato outpost, by February 1. "We're trying to bring a little bit of Brooklyn to Manhattan," he says. As to how one makes cupcakes more Brooklyn, Rich says that flavors like cannoli, zeppole, and cheesecake will "focus in on the Brooklyn lifestyle."
After more than 15 years in the cake business, why venture into the increasingly crowded cupcake field?
"We've always been known for our cakes, but we're really focusing on what the people want," says Rich. "We've seen over the last year or so that more and more customers were requesting that we do some cupcakes; less people were taking pieces of cake. It's the next best thing, really." When they introduced their cupcake line eight months ago, he continues, they started with three flavors, and expanded to 15. Last week, one of the bakery's locations turned out 90 dozen; over Christmas, they did 5,000. "You put some cupcakes out and people go crazy," Rich says.
So crazy, that the company is planning to open a couple more cupcake shops in Manhattan over the next 18 months or so; Rich says that while they haven't yet picked locations, Midtown seems a likely destination.
As for whether or not there's actually an Aunt Butchie, Rich confirms that yes, indeed, there is: she's the mother of his business partner, and lives in Brooklyn. Does she like cupcakes? Rich laughs. "She's old-school," he says, and leaves it at that.
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