The cupcake has been experiencing an unstoppable rise. They really are incredibly popular - last month, Google's annual zeitgeist list included cupcakes as the fastest rising recipe search in the UK. When Pearl Lowe got married a few weeks ago, it was with cupcakes and canapes. Kate Moss was there. So there's a possibility, albeit a slim one, that Moss has eaten one.

It makes absolute sense that this trend - strictly individual cakes, not sharing cakes, which are way passé - started in New York, the home of the rabid individualist, with the 1996 opening of the famous Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street. (Now there are many more of these cupcake vendors - not to mention a proliferation in the UK, including Peyton and Byrne, whose boxes are so aggressively cute that they are basically an interiors statement.) It is totally appropriate that it should have started in the late 90s, the throbbing epicentre of me-me-me. This is not about rediscovering the miracle of baking (though it is a miracle, the way it works); it's about remaking the past. You can have all the best bits of the 50s or 60s without the saddle bags, frumpy aprons, subjugation and the sitting still. You can take that dainty teatime experience and turn it into a one-handed, while-you're-walking, you-moment. All you need is boutique bakeries, to set-dress your delusion.

The upshot has to be fanciful. There can be nothing parsimonious or modest about these things. British fairycake sizing is totally outclassed by the American equivalent. The name, with its doll-party daintiness, is outclassed too. But, more to the point, our fairycake is just too small. Modern standard sizing, such as those used in all decent recipes, is given for the American muffin. They are enormous; I mean, I call it the one-handed snack item, but you need pretty big hands and a huge appetite. And that watery icing that might have tasted a bit like lemon is totally yesterday. Now you need two inches of buttercream. It has to be pink, or green, or baby blue. It has to be piped. It has to reach yearningly skywards like the mackerel heads poking out of a stargazy pie. Only it must be delicious-looking. The modern cupcake looks like a child's dream, a death-row tea. To bowdlerise the M&S advert, it is not just cake, it is me-cake, 21st-century-cake, way-of-life-cake. No, you have to hum the Groove Armada background music. I can't do everything myself.

To return to the Magnolia Bakery, this features prominently in one of those Manhattan set-of-the-sitcoms bus tours: in Sex and the City, the ladies regularly (well ... maybe twice) met here for insane cakes. I think Miranda at one point visits the shop because she is eating cake as a substitute for sex. It's a great swizz, because this programme, which will talk about sex in incredible detail, will never address this aspect of life, which must be absolutely key to their existences, both fictional and real: they must always be thinking about cake. And yet to mention being on a diet would be the endpoint of bad taste. This gives piquancy to the trend: none of these women would eat a complex carbohydrate if it were the elixir of eternal life. Part of the drama and magnetism of these cakes is their forbidden nature, which is why New Yorkers (forbidders extraordinaire) take to them so lustily. They're really not to eat, but to watch: it's pornography rather than cooking. The French equivalent of this, incidentally, are those insanely expensive multicoloured macaroons, so dainty and miniature that even if you were to eat them, you would continue to look lean and chic. That is the French for you: they cannot even do pornography right.

In Britain, we have embraced the movement (well, come on - a movement, and you can eat it? Of course we have embraced it), but for subtly different reasons. We are not so in love with self-denial as New Yorkers, and when we make and buy these items, it is with a mind to eating them rather than just staring. I think we are as in thrall to the individualism as the next nation, but our pin-up, for life as well as for cupcakes, is Nigella. You can carbon date the trend this way: I can tell you with total authority what you will find in Delia's Complete Cookery Course (first published in 1978): some old-school, fairycake-sized butterfly cakes, where you slice the top off, turn it into "wings" and squidge them back on with buttercream, so the cake looks not-at-all like a butterfly. You don't get a modern cupcake from Delia until her most recent book, How To Cheat At Cooking, but I think this is a bit of a cheat itself, because when you have missed a boat for as long as she has missed this one, I really think you should ignore the boat and just swim.

Nigella, on the other hand: this is her signature. Her standard cupcakes are failsafe, her decorative mores copied all over the country. Her dense chocolate cake, rendered for cups, is extraordinary, her jewelled cupcakes (a kind of Christmas cake, only easier and smaller and prettier) are restaurant quality. She does it right because she understands the impulse, which I think in the end is infantile.

Jan MacVarish, sociologist at Kent University, distils it thus: "It is about playing at domestic responsibility in the abstract ... The reality of kids, husbands and real domestic chores then puncture the dream of domestic bliss by making a mess, staying out at the pub when they should be coming home to enjoy cupcakes and generally being very boring and repetitious."

Domesticity is a lot like ageing: it is inevitable, and once upon a time we could accept it, but our acceptance was very limiting and depressing and it was a good thing that we overturned some of those tenets of inevitability - such as it's only women who do chores. But having thrown all that off, we think we can argue our way out of the laws of physics. Gravity, dirt, dishes, the passing of time - these things will always be with us. It feels as if we can only deal with them if we turn them into this tremendous, candy-striped ironic joke.

For my son's first birthday, I made him a caterpillar out of 11 cupcakes, iced green with jelly tots for eyes and caterpillar markings, and I laid it out on moss that I had got from a florist, and nobody realised it was a caterpillar, especially once all these children started eating its body segments. They thought it was more abstract ... someone suggested "a glade of cake". My sister thought it was a cake dell. That is not what you would call a successful mirage. Jane Asher would not have clapped (although I should point out that I got it out of her book). But I was absurdly pleased by the entire experience. Unlike the ironic joke that is Botox, with cupcakes at least you have something you can eat at the end of it.