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Crumbs cupcakes, founded by a Jewish couple, makes a comeback
(New York Jewish Week) — Picture the Upper West Side, circa 2003, the year that Jewish couple Mia and Jason Bauer opened Crumbs Bake Shop at Amsterdam Avenue and 75th Street. In the wake of a cupcake craze kicked off by a “Sex and the City” scene filmed at Magnolia Bakery, fans lined up for Crumbs’ oversized cupcakes, available in inventive varieties like Black-Bottom Cheesecake Brownie, Grasshopper and Squiggle, a gargantuan riff on the traditional Hostess cupcake.
The wildly popular Manhattan bakery quickly grew into a chain — by 2013, Crumbs had more than 70 stores across the country.
Soon, however, the dream crumbled. The Bauers sold the chain in 2011, but by 2014, due to a variety of factors — including increased competition, high real estate costs and general gourmet-cupcake burnout — Crumbs closed its doors. Later that year, an investment group tried to resurrect the troubled brand — reopening some stores and adding challah to the menu on Fridays — but failed.
Now, however, Crumbs is back, with the Bauers again at the helm but with a new business plan: In place of brick-and-mortar bake shops, they are selling desserts online at originalcrumbs.com. They are also offering delivery in New York City through Gopuff, and their baked goods are available at select local supermarket chains, including Gristedes, D’Agostino’s and ShopRite.
“There were things we always wanted to accomplish with the brand that we didn’t have a chance the first time around,” Mia Bauer told the New York Jewish Week. “We didn’t feel like Crumbs kind of petered out the way it deserved to. That wasn’t the ending we foresaw for Crumbs. We really had nurtured it and cultivated it and we felt like it deserved better than that.”
After the original Crumbs folded, Mia spent time raising the couple’s two children in their Short Hills, New Jersey home. She returned to political campaign work, which she was doing prior to becoming a full-time baker. Jason, meanwhile, opened a brokerage business and a spirits company in New York, and also took a corporate position at WeWork.
After a few years, however, the Bauers were ready for a change, and market research confirmed the interest that former Crumbs customers were expressing to Jason.
In 2021, Jason paid just $350 to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to revive the brand. Since then, the couple have been analyzing market research, altering their business model, attending trade shows, creating new recipes and designing new packaging. They formally relaunched the business in November 2023 and it is now known as Original Crumbs Bakeshop.
Now, as before, Crumbs products are kosher: Their cupcakes are under National Kosher supervision by Rabbi Aaron Mehlman, and a new product, soft-baked cookies, are OU-Dairy certified. The Bauers keep a kosher home, and as Jason told the New York Jewish Week, “We wouldn’t sell any food as a profession if it weren’t kosher.”
“The highlight of our week is Shabbat, but Jewish principles are woven throughout our daily existence,” said Jason, who, together with his family, belongs to the Kabbalah Centre in Manhattan, as the family splits its time between New Jersey and the Upper East Side.
Kabbalah, Jason added, “informs our every decision both in our personal and business lives.”
When Crumbs first opened 20 years ago, the bakery became known for their “signature” 4.25-inch diameter cupcakes, described now on their website as “twice the size of a normal cupcake.” At the time, such oversized treats were an anomaly.
“I actually didn’t realize they were oversized,” said Mia, who said she began baking as a child of 7 or 8. “That’s how I always made my cupcakes for family and friends. I assume it started out kind of innocently. I had a muffin pan in my home as a kid and that’s what I used. It didn’t occur to me that my cupcakes were that much bigger than the average cupcake.”
When the Bauers launched Crumbs their goal was to bring back the corner bakery, which, in the early 2000s, had started to disappear; the couple realized that supermarkets were basically the only option for baked goods for many people. At the same time, Mia, who had worked in a bakery as a teenager, had been “longing for the experience of a neighborhood bakery,” according to Jason.
While the new iteration of Crumbs isn’t focused on local bakeries, nostalgia still drives its founders: “We wanted to pivot and be the box of cupcakes or package of cookies that people have in their home,” Mia said, recalling fond memories of Entenmann’s cookies.
During Crumbs’ initial run, Mia — who lived in Israel from ages 1 to 7 and admits to a preference for plain white cake with lots of frosting — ended up creating more than 120 cupcake flavors, with about 30 varieties available in each shop at any given time.
These days, the cupcake varieties have been reduced to 12, plus seasonal and holiday flavors. Crumbs still offers their cupcakes in their signature size, as well classic ( aka “normal”) and mini sizes. The classic-size cupcakes are sold in supermarkets, and will now cost a little more than $2, considerably cheaper than the $4.50 bakeries used to charge.
“We’re able to produce them in volume with efficiencies that allows the price point in supermarkets to be significantly less than it was in our stores,” Jason said.
Crumbs 2.0 has added a line of soft batch cookies in eight flavors, most of which are takeoffs of their most popular cupcake flavors, like Cotton Candy, Sprinkle Sundae and Marshmallow Cookies & Cream. The small, soft-baked cookies — much like the Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies that Mia was so fond of — are packaged in resealable, stackable, plastic cookie jars and cost $8.
“We are pretty fanatical about quality control,” Mia said. “I treated our stores like my kitchen. Even now, in supermarkets, it’s the same quality control.”
According to Jason, every cupcake is still made and decorated by hand, and the cookies are homemade, too. These days, Crumbs has become something of a family business, with the couple’s children — Annabelle, 15 and Zack, 13 — serving as taste-testers, critics and digital media consultants. “We run by both our kids almost anything social media-related to get their input,” Mia said.
Jason sees their return to the bakery business as bashert, using the Yiddish word for destiny. “We’re both very spiritual people,” he said. “We’ve always felt when the opportunity presented itself to us, there’s a reason it came back into our life, so we couldn’t ignore it.”
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The post Crumbs cupcakes, founded by a Jewish couple, makes a comeback appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself. Really?
JNS.org – If I asked you to name the most famous line in the Bible, what would you answer? While Shema Yisrael (“Hear O’Israel”) might get many votes, I imagine that the winning line would be “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). Some religions refer to it as the Golden Rule, but all would agree that it is fundamental to any moral lifestyle. And it appears this week in our Torah reading, Kedoshim.
This is quite a tall order. Can we be expected to love other people as much as we love ourselves? Surely, this is an idealistic expectation. And yet, the Creator knows us better than we know ourselves. How can His Torah be so unrealistic?
The biblical commentaries offer a variety of explanations. Some, like Rambam (Maimonides), say that the focus should be on our behavior, rather than our feelings. We are expected to try our best or to treat others “as if” we genuinely love them.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in his classic text called the Tanya, argues that the actual feelings of love are, in fact, achievable provided that we focus on a person’s spirituality rather than how they present themselves physically. If we can put the soul over the body, we can do it.
Allow me to share the interpretation of the Ramban (Nachmanides), a 13th-century Torah scholar from Spain. His interpretation of the verses preceding love thy neighbor is classic and powerful, yet simple and straightforward.
“Do not hate your brother in your heart. You shall rebuke him, but do not bear a sin because of him” by embarrassing him in public. “Do not take revenge, and do not bear a grudge against your people. You shall love your fellow as yourself, I am God” (Leviticus 19:17-18).
What is the connection between these verses? Why is revenge and grudge-bearing in the same paragraph as love your fellow as yourself?
A careful reading shows that within these two verses are no less than six biblical commandments. But what is their sequence all about, and what is the connection between them?
The Ramban explains it beautifully, showing how the sequence of verses is deliberate and highlighting the Torah’s profound yet practical advice on how to maintain healthy relationships.
Someone wronged you? Don’t hate him in your heart. Speak to him. Don’t let it fester until it bursts, and makes you bitter and sick.
Instead, talk it out. Confront the person. Of course, do it respectfully. Don’t embarrass anyone in public, so that you don’t bear a sin because of them. But don’t let your hurt eat you up. Communicate!
If you approach the person who wronged you—not with hate in your heart but with respectful reproof—one of two things will happen. Either he or she will apologize and explain their perspective on the matter. Or that it was a misunderstanding and will get sorted out between you. Either way, you will feel happier and healthier.
Then you will not feel the need to take revenge or even to bear a grudge.
Here, says the Ramban, is the connection between these two verses. And if you follow this advice, only then will you be able to observe the commandment to Love Thy Neighbor. If you never tell him why you are upset, another may be completely unaware of his or her wrongdoing, and it will remain as a wound inside you and may never go away.
To sum up: Honest communication is the key to loving people.
Now, tell me the truth. Did you know that not taking revenge is a biblical commandment? In some cultures in Africa, revenge is a mitzvah! I’ve heard radio talk-show hosts invite listeners to share how they took “sweet revenge” on someone, as if it’s some kind of accomplishment.
Furthermore, did you know that bearing a grudge is forbidden by biblical law?
Here in South Africa, people refer to a grudge by its Yiddish name, a faribel. In other countries, people call it a broiges. Whatever the terminology, the Torah states explicitly: “Thou shalt not bear a grudge!” Do not keep a faribel, a broiges or resentment of any kind toward someone you believe wronged you. Talk to that person. Share your feelings honestly. If you do it respectfully and do not demean the other’s dignity, then it can be resolved. Only then will you be able to love your fellow as yourself.
May all our grudges and feelings of resentment toward others be dealt with honestly and respectfully. May all our grudges be resolved as soon as possible. Then we will all be in a much better position to love our neighbors as ourselves.
The post Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself. Really? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘Nonsense’: Huckabee Shoots Down Report Trump to Endorse Palestinian Statehood
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee looks on during the day he visits the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City, April 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee on Saturday dismissed as nonsensical the report that President Donald Trump would endorse Palestinian statehood during his tour to the Persian Gulf this week.
“This report is nonsense,” Huckabee harrumphed on his X account, blasting the Jerusalem Post as needing better sourced reporting. “Israel doesn’t have a better friend than the president of the United States.”
Trump is set to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The leader’s first trip overseas since he took office comes as Trump seeks the Gulf countries’ support in regional conflicts, including the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and curbing Iran’s advancing nuclear program.
However, reports citing administration insiders claimed that Trump has also set his sights on the ambitious goal of expanding the Abraham Accords. These agreements, initially signed in 2020, normalized relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. The accords are widely held to be among the most important achievements of the first Trump administration.
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US to Put Military Option Back on Table If No Immediate Progress in Iran Talks
US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy-designate Steve Witkoff gives a speech at the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena on the inauguration day of Trump’s second presidential term, in Washington, DC, Jan. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
i24 News – Unless significant progress is registered in Sunday’s round of nuclear talks with Iran, the US will consider putting the military option back on the table, sources close to US envoy Steve Witkoff told i24NEWS.
American and Iranian representatives voiced optimism after the previous talks that took place in Oman and Rome, saying there was a friendly atmosphere despite the two countries’ decades of enmity.
However the two sides are not believed to have thrashed out the all-important technical details, and basic questions remain.
The source has also underscored the significance of the administration’s choice of Michael Anton, the State Department’s policy planning director, as the lead representative in the nuclear talks’ technical phases.
Anton is “an Iran expert and someone who knows how to cut a deal with Iran,” the source said, saying that the choice reflected Trump’s desire to secure the deal.
The post US to Put Military Option Back on Table If No Immediate Progress in Iran Talks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.