Georgetown Cupcake’s cupcake eating challenge in Coney Island. Photo by Molly Lucas.
Coney Island is already known the world over as the home of the annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. But this summer, the Brooklyn neighborhood also became home to the first cupcake-eating competition.
Organized by the famous sisters behind Georgetown Cupcake, Katherine Kallinis and Sophie LaMontagne, the stars of the reality television series “DC Cupcakes”, the contest was lively, loud, and a lot of fun.
Hundreds of people flooded the boardwalk on June 30 to cheer on seven brave contestants who wolfed down as many cupcakes as their stomachs could handle in eight minutes.
The winner, Stephanie “Xanadu” Torres, scarfed down 71 vanilla Georgetown cupcakes topped with a generous dollop of butter cream frosting. She believes the prettily decorated baked goods cupcakes could potentially replace hot dogs as the most popular food to competitively eat. That’s due to their “moist, fluffy quality that made them easy to swallow and proved that they were incredibly well-baked,” she said.
LaMontagne said she loves cupcakes because “there’s something intrinsically personal about the dessert.” “It’s made just for you— a perfect single-serving,” she proclaimed.
The sisters bake their cupcakes fresh every day and believe their attention to detail is what transformed their tiny, Washington DC bakery into the cupcake mecca that it is today.
While their success definitely came as a surprise to the both of them, the sisters have big plans to take their business to the next level in the future. With locations in Georgetown, Bethesda, M.D., SoHo, Boston, and Los Angeles (opening in September), the visionaries behind Georgetown Cupcake have taken something as simple as a cupcake and helped to popularize it for the mainstream.
I highly recommend these rich yet light cupcakes. But don’t take my word for it—just ask Torres, who ate more than 70 of them in under eight minutes.
