Cupcakes

At my boyfriend's house today, I started absent-mindedly flicking through a book his Mum owned. It was called '200 cupcakes', and as you would expect, it contained a vast array of different recipes for cupcakes. There were all sorts- honey and banana, frosted flower (yes, edible flower with frosting on it), fruit and nut, all beautifully iced and sitting decoratively on a lovely stand with lovely things like rose petals and stuff adorning them.
And I started to realise something: cupcakes make me uneasy. There is something inherently suspicious and mistrustful about a cupcake. I think that the main trouble is that they look so nice. Their appearance makes you want to eat them because you want to eat things that look nice, but it also makes you feel like you shouldn't eat them. It always seems a shame to ruin some nice piped icing by putting a massive bite mark in it. And if they are decorated with inedible things, like flower petals or plastic decorations, you have to pick them off which makes them look less nice. It's almost as if we're not supposed to actually eat them, just sit and admire how delicious-looking they are, like you're presumably supposed to do with this ceramic one. This paradox is unsettling and confusing and makes me feel weird inside.
Also, underneath the nice smell of vanilla essence, cupcakes give off the unmistakeable whiff of toil. Someone will have toiled to make those cupcakes look so delicious. I would estimate that icing a batch of cupcakes properly and meticulously adding all the decorations and things before arranging them nicely on a stand probably takes an average of 45 minutes. And I would estimate that the maximum time anyone takes to eat a cupcake is probably around 7 minutes. So why the toil? It makes me wonder if the only people who make cupcakes are:
 a) People who are desperately bored and have A LOT of time on their hands and get some sort of sense of achievement from really carefully making cupcakes look just so. (This kind of toil reeks of unfulfilment.)
b) People who like to arrange their food but not actually eat it.  (This kind of toil smells of underlying food issues.)

Obviously I am generalising about the cupcake-making populous here. I am sure there are some people who make cupcakes because they just find it relaxing or something. Also, I do understand that it's nice to eat food that looks good. The thing is, though, that you could probably make a cupcake look alright and pretty appetising with a bit of water icing, which takes about 3 minutes to make and put on a batch of cakes, and some sprinkles, which probably take about 2 minutes to put on some cakes. It seems so needless (and expensive) to whack out the banana chips and the fondant icing and the buttercream and the bits of lavender and whatever.
My other problem with cupcakes is that I don't actually find them that tasty. The icing is so thick and sugary I can practically feel my tooth enamel eroding as I eat it, and this distracts me from any deliciousness that might be contained in the cake. To me, the icing tastes of going on a bouncy castle immediately after jelly and ice cream at a kids' birthday party. Sort of sicky. This leads me to ANOTHER problem I have with them- the 'kiddiness' of them. They are cutesy in an incredibly try-hard sort of way, like a girl who talks in a baby voice to make boys like her. Their cuteness is their only distinguishing feature, really, and I feel that as an official grown-up, (I am 20 and a graduate and my title is Ms so there), I should be tucking into something like a carrot cake or a nice slab of banana loaf. I can at least pretend that these things have some kind of nutritional value and aren't going to make me go 'hyper' for 3 hours after eating them.
After some rooting around on the internet, I have found that I am not alone in my dislike of cupcakes. This facebook group are quite extreme in their hatred, showing the strength of feeling that a cupcake can goad people into. This website takes quite an academic approach to their dislike of cupcakes (and the author would also specifically rather eat banana bread or carrot cake than a cupcake, how weird). This person also hates them. I am sure there are thousands more.