What can I say about my first weeks in Paris? They. Were. Heaven. I knew such euphoria wasn’t sustainable—thirty-six years of experience had taught me that you can always count on a startling crash after the delicious sugar high. So I relished every second of it.

After three weeks in the crummy Pigalle hotel, which skeeved me out to the point where I wouldn’t let the blankets touch my face or my bare feet come in contact with the carpeting, I was happy to finally be settling into my new apartment, my new routine, my new life. I was luckier than most. Not only had I come to Paris to live my dream, but somebody else was navigating the nuances of French bureaucracy and footing the bill on my behalf. Ogilvy set me up with a real estate agent who was as tenacious as any New York broker, orchestrating a single marathon day in which we viewed eleven apartments.

“Operation Dream Pad!” I chirped, driving along the traffic-choked quay overlooking the Seine, on our way from the third apartment in the ninth arrondissement—one of those “up and coming” neighborhoods that was slowly being infiltrated by trendy restaurants and young families—to our next appointment across town in the coveted sixth arrondissement, Paris’s Upper East Side, if you will.

I knew the neighborhood profiles thanks mostly to Michael, one of my two friends in Paris. I had met him at a party in New York, one week prior to my Tour du Chocolat vacation. Chatting in a giant Chelsea apartment, The Strokes and Hot Chip thumping so loudly it jiggled my skat, I leaned in toward this River Phoenix–lookalike telling me he lived in Paris. When he went on to specify that he lived in Canal Saint-Martin, I made him promise to show me around the neighborhood, then unknown to me, the next week.

Sure enough, eight days later, I was staring at his back as he took me on my first Vélib’ ride, guiding me past the canal’s peaked iron bridges and enchanting locks—where Amélie had skipped stones, I excitedly pointed out—to the flat and sprawling Parc de la Villette for a picnic. It was the ultimate romantic summer evening in Paris. Eight o’clock, but the sun still hung in the sky. We had a bottle of rosé, a perfectly crunchy baguette, and a big, stinking hunk of Camembert.

Except there was no romancing.

Not even five minutes into our bike ride, Michael started launching into his exploits of and escapades with Gallic women—code for Don’t get any ideas, missy, I have more sophisticated conquests than you. Biking home that night, alone, I was disappointed that this storybook rendezvous was wasted on a platonic encounter. But it turns out a friend, not a fling, was the perfect outcome.

All those months when Ogilvy took forever with the contract and I was wavering about moving to Paris, it was Michael whom I emailed, and Michael who responded right away with plenty of Paris persuasion, plus encyclopedic knowledge of expat living. The second, tenth, and eleventh arrondissements were the hippest places to live, he reported. I would have to set aside my own tax fund since France didn’t deduct taxes like they do in the States. Do not bring an American DVD player, but buy one in France, with the correct voltage and compatible technology. All the insights and tips he had shared helped me feel more confident in situations like this, driving around with a foreign broker, trying to find the perfect home. And sure enough, by the end of the day, I had narrowed the eleven apartment options down to three contenders, and I got my top choice: a sixth-floor walk-up in the second arrondissement.

Paris is a city of villages, each quartier, or neighborhood, its own little universe. The pedestrian Montorgueil quartier I now lived in was, as far as I could tell, one of the city’s best—dynamic, central, and young. And with my new apartment’s lofty ceilings, exposed wood beams, and views of the Centre Pompidou to the south, Sacré-Coeur to the north, and hundreds of zinc rooftops peppered with terra-cotta chimneys in between, it was like my own little tree house in the city. It suited me and Milo just fine.

The Ogilvy office elicited the same schoolgirl titters from me. A classic hôtel particulier right on the Champs-Élysées, I sat overlooking the famed boulevard, beneath sixteen-foot-tall ceilings painted with frescoes of chubby cherubs and fair maidens and dripping with crystal chandeliers. When my boss showed me the rooftop terrace (yes, a rooftop terrace, on the Champs-Élysées; this was my new workplace), I thought I was going to bump my nose against the Eiffel Tower, it was so close.

Remembering how efficient—and fun!—the Vélib’s had been the previous summer on my chocolate tour, I relied on them instead of the Métro to get to work every morning. This public bike sharing system has over twenty thousand industrial-looking road bikes stationed at kiosks around the city that are yours to take, so long as you have a daily, weekly, or annual subscription. The bikes have three speeds, little bells for warning heedless pedestrians that you’re coming their way, and wire baskets for carrying your bags—or, if you’re a super-chic Frenchie, your adorable Jack Russell terrier.

I’d hop on a bike around the corner from my tree house, wind around the delivery trucks in Japantown’s narrow streets, and join the cacophony of revving scooters and gushing fountains in Place de la Concorde, where King Louis XVI had been guillotined over two hundred years ago.

The square’s grandeur and beauty shocked me anew every day: the scale of the gold-tipped monument, the magnificent dome of Les Invalides in the distance, and, further still, peeking over the sculpted trees, the Eiffel Tower. It was like being part of a moving orchestra—my beating heart and pumping legs trying to match the rhythm of the trucks, buses, taxis, cars, scooters, and pedestrians swooshing through the motorway.

Then I’d peel off to Avenue Gabriel and give my silent respects while pedaling by the U.S. embassy and President Sarkozy’s residence, admire the grand dames strolling the sidewalks in the tony eighth arrondissement, and then finish my ride. I parked the Vélib’ in the closest kiosk to the office, which just so happened to be outside the grand and historical tea salon with some of the best cakes and macarons in the city: Ladurée.

Two mornings a week, I went to the office early to meet Josephine, my French tutor, arranged by Ogilvy. With her perpetually perspiring brow, rosy cheeks, and powdery perfume smell, she reminded me of my third-grade teacher, Miss Dickus. Or maybe it was just because I felt like a schoolgirl, taking lessons again. The office was always quiet at 8:30 a.m., save for the cleaning crew’s vacuums, giving us ninety minutes of conversational and grammatical lessons—well, less the fifteen minutes that Josephine always reserved for complaining about the weather, the Métro, being overworked, or a combination of all three.

As keen as I was to learn French, always completing my homework and paying close attention to Josephine’s perfectly planned lessons, I soon learned that language is not my strong suit. But still, I did what I could and started a list of handy slang, picked up from colleagues and fashion websites, that was almost more essential than the passé composé and “er,” “ir,” and “re” verbs. I learned words and expressions like ça marche (that works, or, okay) and ça craint (that sucks); talons hauts (high heels) and baskets (trendy sneakers); malin (wicked smart or cool) and putain (literally, a whore, but used as an expression of frustration, anger, or awe). I learned that the French like to manger les mots, creating shorthand like bon app for bon appétit, d'acc instead of d’accord, and resto rather than restaurant. After years of being on cruise control, there was now something new to learn every day.

It was almost stupid how picture-perfect my new life was. The whole thing felt like a cliché, even to me. There I was, in the fashion capital of the world, working on one of the most recognizable and successful luxury brands. One day, as I wandered around the Louis Vuitton flagship store on the Champs-Élysées—part of my professional obligation, for God’s sake—I literally pinched myself. Was this for real? Why was I there? How was I suddenly living in Paris, among the 2,000 evening dresses and 98 percent dark chocolate bars? Was it fate? I didn’t have the answers, but I smiled with giddiness, hopelessly in love with the entire world.

As smiley as I was, my enthusiasm was not infectious.

“Avez-vous du pain complét ce soir?” I asked, waltzing into “my” boulangerie one evening for some whole wheat bread. Surely, the squat, bespectacled madam behind the counter recognized me by now? I had been coming in for weeks, demonstrating not only my loyalty to her business, but also my appreciation for French culture. Each visit, I requested a different kind of bread: a round and rustic boule au levain; pain bûcheron, kneaded and roasted to crunchy perfection; the baguette aux céréales with its delightful mix of sesame, sunflower, millet, and poppy seeds. It was my duty to understand France’s abundance of deliciousness.

“Non, madame.” Blank face. She wasn’t budging. So what if I ate whole wheat? I was still une étrangère in her eyes, not a Frenchie. I felt a momentary pang of defeat from her indifference. With other recent roadblocks due to my inability to decipher the deposit forms at the bank, the milk labels at the grocery store, the processes (or lack thereof) at the office, and, generally, just what the hell everyone was saying to me, being unceremoniously shut down was a feeling that was beginning to edge in on my bliss more and more often. It was after seven o’clock and the shelves were nearly depleted.

I had a new bread addiction for which I needed a fix, tout de suite. Suddenly, as if my guardian angel and Houdini had been conspiring in the kitchen, a young man dusted in flour appeared from behind a curtain with a cylindrical basket of fresh baguettes. My smile returned. “Pas grave,” I declared. “Une demi-baguette, s’il vous plaît!”

The woman pulled one of the golden specimens from the basket—the man sauntering back behind the curtain from where he magically came—deftly sliced it in two, and slipped one half in a paper sack—une demi-baguette, perfect for the single girl. “Avec ceci?” she asked in that French sing-song way, drawing out the “ce” and especially the “ci,” peering over her wire-rims. The French were always pushing a little more on you.

“Non, c’est tout,” I replied, happy for this little exchange that made me—almost—feel like I belonged here. I grabbed the change she plunked on the counter and turned on my heel. “Merci, madame!” I bellowed, careful to enunciate each syllable like the good French student I was.

“Merci à vous,” she replied, the ingrained French politesse kicking in. “Bonne soirée.”

Out on the sidewalk, in the damp April air, my smile erupted again. Through the thin boulangerie paper, I could feel the warmth of the baguette, making it irresistibly squishy in my hand. It was one of God’s gifts to the world, I had decided: French bread, fresh from the oven. There was no way I was waiting until I was back at my tree house to indulge. I tore a piece of the baguette off, trailing crumbs behind me, and crunched into it. The crust resisted for a moment and then the crisp outside revealed the doughy, dense, and spongy inside. How could four little ingredients—flour, water, yeast, and salt—produce something so otherworldly? I stopped on the sidewalk, my eyes rolling in the back of my head as I chewed very, very slowly, savoring the baguette’s flavor.

I opened my eyes and a girl smoking outside a bar was staring at me. I had become infatuated with French women, more so than the slim-hipped, effeminate men, developing girl-crushes daily. Their lips were always painted perfectly in magenta or tomato red. Their eyeliner was at once retro and modern, like Brigitte Bardot’s. And their hair was always disheveled but perfectly so, as if they’d just had a romp in bed. They were sexy, stylish, and gorgeous. I felt horribly dull with my brown hair and au naturel makeup—both pretty much unchanged since the day I graduated from college. Whenever I was around a particularly jolie femme, I could hear Edith Wharton whispering in my ear, “Compared with the women of France, the average American woman is still in kindergarten.” Touché, Edith.

The girl outside the bar was in Parisian uniform: slim jeans tucked into short cowboy booties, a leather coat hanging off her thin frame, and an oversized scarf, which, like her hair, was effortlessly yet studiously haphazard. I smiled. I felt a bonding moment between us, her looking at me, me looking at her, just two girls of the world. But she just pulled an impossibly long drag from her cigarette, tossed it in the gutter, and subtly rolled her eyes before disappearing back inside the bar. Paris was cool; apparently, I was not.

In fact, I knew I wasn’t. Edith Wharton wasn’t the only thing I had been reading. I had been dipping into all the tomes about living in and adjusting to France and I suddenly recalled a small but important gem. That in America, everyone smiles at strangers—your neighbors, the checkout girl, the cop giving you a ticket for doing 45 in a 35-mile-per-hour zone—as a friendly, pacifying gesture. In France, the only people who smile at strangers are mentally retarded.

I found the insight so ridiculous and funny and, if I were any example, apparently true. I laughed out loud and continued down the street with my baguette, looking “touched” for sure.

As American as I appeared with my big, dorky grin on the outside, I was beginning to understand—a deep, in-my-bones understanding—the French appreciation for food.

Nobody at the office deigned to eat lunch at their desks as we had habitually done in New York. Little pockets of colleagues broke off and ceremoniously ate together. A small group of twenty-something-year-old women would have their meals, packed from home, in the office kitchen, while most of the guys went out to local cafés. I tried not to mind not having anyone to lunch with yet, and quickly learned not to “eeeet in zeee streeeeet,” as one of my colleagues caught me doing one day—a true faux pas to the always-proper Parisians. Instead, I took advantage of the break to explore the neighborhood.

Offices cleared out and boutiques were closed from noon until 2:00 p.m., while the sidewalks, boulangeries, and bistros came alive. The French got so much pleasure out of shopping for and eating food every day. Mealtime was sacred. Food was celebrated. It wasn’t forbidden or an enemy for which the French needed gym memberships, cabbage soup diets, or magic powders and pills (though I did have my suspicions about French women and laxatives).

What’s more, there were entire shops devoted to singular foods: stocky, pot-bellied men in wader boots and white lab coats stood outside poissonneries, even in the coldest weather, showcasing filets of the catch of the day, while other boutiques offered scores of colorful and alluring tins of foie gras. On Sunday afternoons, so many people stood in line at the fromageries, boulangeries, and boucheries that I made a game out of counting them. How wonderful that families were stocking up for their big Sunday repas, doing all their food shopping the day of the meal, at small neighborhood businesses. Back home, we’d load up a giant grocery cart once a week at a superstore, and then shelve the packaged goods in the pantry until memory or hunger called them forth. Fresh, local, and delicious was not the marketing mantra du jour in Paris. It’s just the way it was.

Before choosing my apartment, I hadn’t really understood why Michael was so gung ho about the second arrondissement. My previous visits to Paris had given me the impression that it was more commercial and touristy than residential and charming. But I soon discovered that my neighborhood was one of the biggest foodie meccas in the city, anchored by the four-block pedestrian stretch of rue Montorgueil. By my count, it had two cheese shops (fromageries), four produce markets (marchés), four butchers (boucheries), one of which was devoted to chickens (un rotisserie), a fish market (poissonnerie), four chocolate boutiques (chocolatiers), an ice cream shop (un glacier), six bakeries (boulangeries), four wine stores (caves au vin), an Italian specialty shop, and a giant market filled with heaps of spices, dried fruits, nuts, and grains that were sculpted into neat domes and sold by the gram. There was even a store devoted just to olive oils. And all of these were interspersed between no fewer than a dozen cafés, a couple florists (fleuristes), and myriad tabacs, where weathered old men bought their Lotto tickets and drank beer with their mutts and neighbors.

Walking that stretch of food paradise that was my new neighborhood, which I made sure to do at least once a day, made all my senses tingle: produce—towering stacks of purple-flecked artichokes and pyramids of pert, shiny clementines—was displayed like kinetic sculptures, changing shape as the day went on and the inventory decreased. The pungency of ripe, stinky cheeses duked it out with the smell of savory fat drippings falling from chickens that roasted on spits into pans of peeled potatoes below. And even though I hadn’t eaten red meat in over ten years, I still took the time to peer into the charcuteries, marveling at the coils of sausages and terrines of pâtés and how wonderfully they were displayed. The food was treated so respectfully that I had no choice but to genuflect. It was glorious.

And then there were the pâtisseries and boulangeries. While I had arrived in Paris with the names of only two friends scribbled on a scrap of paper, I had a carefully researched, very thorough two-page spreadsheet of must-try pâtisseries. I got right to work.

Within weeks, I had explored all the boulangeries and pâtisseries near me and quickly became obsessed with Stohrer’s pain aux raisins. Come to find out, Stohrer wasn’t just the prettiest and most charming bakery on rue Montorgueil, but it also had the most illustrious roots, having been started in 1730 by King Louis XV’s royal pâtissier, Nicolas Stohrer. I’d never been interested in pain aux raisins before, always preferring a rich and melty pain au chocolat, a rectangular croissant hiding two batonettes of chocolate inside, to something with ho-hum raisins. But one morning when I saw Stohrer’s pastry pinwheels, filled generously with crème pâtissière and riddled with raisins looking especially puffy and inviting, I gave it a try. It was still slightly warm. It was sweeter than I expected. I was smitten.

Inspired, I set off for other boulangeries and pâtisseries in the city. There was Les Petits Mitrons, a cute little pink pâtisserie in Montmartre that specialized in tarts: chocolate-walnut, chocolate-pear, apple-pear, straight-up chocolate, straight-up apple, apricot, peach, rhubarb, fig, fruits-rouges, strawberry-cream, mixed fruit, and on and on. From there, I ventured east to one of the city’s only other hilly quartiers, Belleville, searching for the best croissant in Paris.

As I pedaled through the working-class neighborhood on my way to La Flute Gana, a boulangerie I had read about, I had a happy jolt, suddenly remembering one of my favorite all-time French movies: The Triplets of Belleville. The image of those three crazy animated ladies, snapping their fingers, swinging their derrières, and singing on stage evoked such unadulterated glee, which was matched once I arrived at the boulangerie and bit into my long-anticipated croissant: a gazillion little layers of fine, buttery pastry dough, coiled and baked together in soft-crunchy perfection.

Every weekend, my sweet explorations continued this way. On the chichi shopping stretch of rue Saint-Honoré, I indulged in Jean-Paul Hévin’s Choco Passion, a rich nutty and fruity cake with a flaky praline base, dark chocolate ganache, and chocolate mousse whipped with tart passion fruit. In the Marais, a neighborhood alternatively known for its Jewish roots, gay pride, and fantastic shopping, I sampled Pain de Sucre’s juicy and herbaceous rhubarb and rosemary tart. I discovered that the wonderful 248-year-old, lost-in-time candy and chocolate shop in the ninth arrondissement, À la Mère de Famille, carried dried pineapple rings, a treat I had been obsessed with for three decades (don’t ask; I think it’s a texture thing). And I started developing a new weakness for Haribo gummies, available at any old crummy supermarket.

As I cruised by the Jardin du Luxembourg, just beginning to burst in an array of spring greens, with a belly full of matcha-flavored ganache from the nearby Japanese pâtisserie Sadaharu Aoki, I rationalized that pastry hunting was a very good way for me to get to know my new hometown. But as I continued Vélib’ing around town and eating up Parisian sweets, no one could have been more surprised than me to discover that cupcakes were now storming the Bastille.

I think it’s safe to say that by 2007 or 2008, cupcakes trumped apple pie as the all-American iconic sweet. And I witnessed their rise to sugary stardom firsthand in New York.

When I moved to the city in 2001, the trend was just taking off. At the time, I was also on the brink. I was almost thirty years old, excited and hopeful for all that might be. After spending my twenties in San Francisco, much of it in a seven-year relationship that ultimately wasn’t “the one,” and in an advertising career in which I always felt the desire to write for a glossy magazine tugging at me, I had moved back east to pursue my dreams. I had proven to myself that I could be an advertising copywriter. Now I wanted to be a New York writer, who had a byline in the Times and lunched at Union Square Café. The world was my proverbial oyster. But, since I don’t like briny delicacies, I considered the world my cupcake instead: sweet and inviting, familiar yet new, indulgent but only modestly so. And just when I thought I had tasted every possibility—yellow cake with chocolate frosting, chocolate with vanilla buttercream, peanut butter cup—a new cupcakery would open, and there would be a whole new inspired menu to bite into.

As I blazed my personal cupcake trail, Carrie Bradshaw and Miranda Hobbes sent the whole world into a cupcake tizzy. Once those two sat chomping into their pink frosted cupcakes, dishing on Aidan, in the third season of Sex and the City, the petits gâteaux became inescapable. And Magnolia Bakery, the location of their sweet moment, went from modestly successful to insanely popular to polarizing and reviled.

Magnolia was started in July of 1996 by two friends, Allysa Torey and Jennifer Appel. On a quiet corner in the West Village, they launched a genius concept: old-fashioned baked goods—perfectly frosted three-layer cakes, freshly baked pies dusted with cinnamon, fudgy brownies, and tart lemon squares—served up in an adorable, wholesome space that could have been Betty Crocker’s own kitchen. But as the business soared, the women’s relationship soured. Three years after opening, they split, with Allysa running the original bakery solo, and Jennifer moving to Midtown to open Buttercup, a bakery with virtually the same exact menu and aesthetic. Both of them churned out pretty pastel cupcakes, and the city ate them up.

Buttercup, probably because of its unsexy midtown location, fared just okay, but Magnolia went gangbusters. The more popular it became, the more people loved to hate it. The staff was infamously snippy. The lines, which grew so long they snaked out the door and around the corner, started annoying the neighbors. Then the Sex and the City tour buses rolled in and put everyone over the top. The bakery and its cupcakes became synonymous with Carrie Bradshaw wannabes, tottering in their heels and not caring about on whose front stoop they were dropping their frosting-laced wrappers.

The cupcakes themselves were hit or miss, love ’em or hate ’em. While cake flavors were the standard yellow, chocolate, and red velvet, and generally tasty, it was the frosting that sent everyone spiraling. It was über sweet, pastel-colored, dotted with vibrant sprinkles, and swirled on in abundance. These little cakes became the downtown must-have accessory, as fashionable as the T-shirts and coin purses Marc Jacobs was peddling across the street.

Meanwhile, other cupcakeries were popping up all over Manhattan. A near Magnolia replica turned up in Chelsea when a former bakery manager jumped ship to open his Americana bakeshop, Billy’s (the one AJ and I frequented). Two Buttercup employees similarly ventured downtown to the Lower East Side and opened Sugar Sweet Sunshine, expanding into new flavors like the Lemon Yummy, lemon cake with lemon buttercream, and the Ooey Gooey, chocolate cake with chocolate almond frosting. Dee-licious.

Other bakeries opted for their own approach. A husband-and-wife team opened Crumbs, purveyor of five-hundred-calorie softball-sized juggernauts, in outrageous flavors like Chocolate Pecan Pie and Coffee Toffee, topped with candy shards and cookie bits. There were also mini cupcakes in wacky flavors like chocolate chip pancake and peanut butter and jelly from Baked by Melissa and Kumquat’s more gourmet array like lemon-lavender and maple-bacon.

Revered pastry chefs also got in on the action. After opening ChikaLicious, the city’s first dessert bar, Chika Tillman launched a take-out spot across the street that offered Valrhona chocolate buttercream-topped cupcakes. And Pichet Ong, a Jean-Georges Vongerichten alum and dessert bar and bakery rock star, attracted legions of loyal fans—no one more than myself—to his West Village bakery, Batch, with his carrot salted-caramel cupcake.

By 2009, dozens of bakeries vied for the title of Best Cupcake in New York. There were literally hundreds of flavors, sizes, and styles; they were sold with different philosophies, and sometimes even rules applied (no more than six cupcakes for you, missy!). Surely, the city could only stomach so much sugar? A cupcake crash was inevitable, though it took years longer than I ever expected.

It had been almost two months since I had arrived in Paris. I still hadn’t experienced a free-falling sugar crash, though I was beginning to feel a little schizophrenic. One minute, I’d be ecstatically doing the cha-cha in my tree house, and the next, I’d be cursing the six flights of stairs that kicked my ass to get up there. After a day of being unable to conceal my big American smile, someone would be rude to me and my chin would start trembling with hurt. Which led to doubt, which led to me feeling like a seven-year-old being ostracized on the playground, doomed never to fit in. I’d reprimand myself: Buck up! Get over it! You’re living your dream, you have no right to be sad or feel sorry for yourself!

But after a couple months away from home, my confidence was taking a beating in the face of so many changes and challenges. It was a salty-sweet mélange of excitement and dread. Bliss and dismay. Giddiness and loneliness. I had already gotten myself right back up from the ground after flying over the handlebars of a Vélib’ one time, but on a Saturday afternoon, after having fallen down the stairs of a boutique, horribly embarrassing myself, butchering my knee and, worst of all, ruining my brand new Robert Clergerie talons hauts, I limped home, confidence shattered along with tough-girl façade. I called AJ.

“Hello?” a very sleepy voice answered. I looked at my clock and only then did the math. Merde. It was 9:00 a.m. in New York.

“Hi. Did I wake you?”

“No, no,” AJ valiantly said from across the ocean. “Don’t worry about it. How are you?” I could hear her getting up. She never would have ignored a call from me. Even though I relied on her altruism, it still astounded me.

“Mmmm…I’m okay…” I found myself hedging, for some reason not wanting to say anything negative about Paris or my feeling vulnerable, even though it’s why I had called.

“Aim, hold on, just a sec, sorry.” I heard AJ covering the mouthpiece, followed by muffled conversation. Hmmmm…she wasn’t alone? I knew she had started dating someone right around the time I moved, but I’d be surprised if he was already spending the night. Come to think of it, she had been very mum about men lately, which, according to my knowledge of her dating behavior, developed from two-plus decades of experience, meant it was nothing serious. She would have been sharing blow-by-blow info if there was someone worth talking about. Turns out, I was wrong.

“Who was that?” I asked when she returned to the phone.

“Hold on,” and I heard the door click behind her. A moment later, she was revealing that it was Mitchell, the very same guy she started seeing when I moved to Paris—and they were indeed getting serious. In fact, they were all but inseparable.

I was, well, shell-shocked—which at least distracted me from my now-throbbing knee. I hadn’t even remembered this guy’s name, for crying out loud, and he was suddenly important in my best friend’s life? “So what makes him different? What have you guys been doing together? What’s the deal?” I asked quick-fire, as if I were interviewing her for an article.

“Well, he’s just pretty amazing, you know? He’s smart and edgy. He’s cool. And he’s from the Midwest, so we have a lot of shared values, which is becoming more important to me.” As AJ went on, I felt like I had entered a time warp. Wait a minute, I thought. In the time I’ve been trying to decipher my cable box in French, she’s met someone edgy and cool who she feels compatible with?

Sure, I was also having a love affair—with a city. But AJ was smitten with a man. I could hear it in her voice. And while I was happy for my best friend, I also started feeling sorry for myself. After weeks of exerting so much effort and trying so hard to acclimate, I was tired. Frustrated. Lonely and uncertain. I had Michael and was becoming friendly with another writer at Ogilvy, but these weren’t friends I could call in this vulnerable state and hash through my feelings over cocktails. A fierce wave of alienation nearly knocked me over when AJ and I hung up. What was I doing here? I looked around my tree house, which suddenly felt foreign. I needed a taste of home, I decided, no matter how small.

Right before my arrival in Paris, two sisters—Rebecca and Maggie Bellity—opened Cupcakes & Co. in the eleventh arrondissement. They had traveled throughout the States and been inspired by the cupcake trend that had spread across the country. When they returned to Paris in the fall of 2008, they set up what was then Paris’s sole cupcake bakery, making a name for themselves by not only featuring these funny little foreign treats, but also touting natural and organic ingredients, another hot foodie trend. As I coasted on a Vélib’ through the unfamiliar backstreets behind the Bastille, searching for this itty-bitty spot I had read about, I was filled with anticipation. Would their cupcakes be as good as those in the States?

When I arrived, the afternoon sun was spilling through the picture window onto the bakery’s one table. The space was tiny. The menu, however, was not. Choosing between five or ten cupcake flavors, the number most New York bakeries offered, was hard enough. But Cupcakes & Co. had over twenty varieties, and they all sounded heavenly: coffee and hazelnut, poppy seed with orange cream cheese frosting, vanilla bourbon cake with glazed figs and pine nuts. Miam, my new favorite word popped into my head—the French equivalent of yum.

I stood like a clueless American tourist, cross-referencing the descriptions on the chalkboard menu with the pretty creations in the display case. There were many unfamiliar words—fondant chocolat and ganache au beurre—which I filed away for future reference. Face scrunched in concentration, I tortured myself making this very important decision. While I knew a cupcake would momentarily transport me back to New York, the connection went deeper and further than that. It took me back to when I was an awkward third grader, alone in the world for the very first time.

I was eight when my parents got divorced and my mom shepherded me and my older brother, Chris, from our home in Hartford, Connecticut, to the shoreline where she grew up. When we left my neighborhood friends and our grand old house, I cried with heartache and disbelief. What would I do without my two best friends right next door? How could I live without the big Douglas fir outside my bedroom window? Who would make runs to the drugstore for strawberry Charleston Chews and nutty Whatchamacallits with me? Now when the yellow bus dropped me off from school, I had to unlock the front door of our raised ranch with my own key that I hyperconsciously carried in my front pocket. I was a latchkey kid. For the first time in my life, I was all alone.

But if the house was empty every day when I got home from school, at least the bread drawer was always full. Devil Dogs and Twinkies, Ho Hos and Chocodiles, Chips Ahoy and Nutter Butters, Oreos and Fudge Stripes, Scooter Pies and Pinwheels, Entenmann’s danishes and Pillsbury pastries, brownies and blondies, chocolate cake and carrot cake, Linzer torts and cherry pie, coffee cake and jelly doughnuts, jelly beans and licorice whips, Swedish fish and gummy worms, M&Ms and bridge mix, Kit Kats and Twix, ice cream and popsicles, Fruit Loops and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Pepperidge Farm and Keebler, Hostess and Drake’s, Mars and Cadbury…

All those years after the divorce, there was a Technicolor parade of sweets masquerading as my companions. How could I not cling to and love them? They never disappointed me. They had the magical power to console and cheer me up. They made life celebratory and fun. Especially a cream-filled Hostess CupCake.

Ripping open the cellophane package of those cupcakes was like unwrapping a little gift. It gave me a rapturous—albeit fleeting—diversion from my dull, empty life. With the lonesome shuffling between Mom and Dad, whom Chris and I visited every other weekend, I deserved those little treats, dammit! I focused first on the frosting, peeling the waxy layer off the cake in one sheaf, folding it in half, and savoring the gritty-smooth texture when I bit into it. Then came the sugary implosion of the cake’s faux-cream center. I made each cupcake last for eight or nine delicious bites. Even though we always had sweets in the house, money was tight, and we were on a budget. If I were to devour the whole box of cupcakes, I would have nothing to look forward to the next day. Or the day after that. I knew to ration my Hostess CupCakes so I could always have a taste of comfort, even when money, attention, and hope were sparse.

To this day, a cupcake can make me feel like all is well in the world.

The longer I analyzed Cupcake & Co.’s menu, the more my taste buds perked up. Even better than feeling the cartwheels of anticipation in my belly, my spirits started lifting. Finally, I felt ready to make a decision: I chose the Scheherazade, an irresistible-sounding combination of pistachio cake with cream cheese frosting and a raspberry center, topped with a generous sprinkling of crushed pistachios and one perfect raspberry. I’ve always loved raspberries but since arriving in Paris had a newfound passion for pistachios, which were included in so many delectable desserts and pastries, either whole or ground with sugar into delicious marzipan.

Feeling conspicuous in the petite bakery, I thanked the lady and took my loot to the community park across the street. The square’s center was filled with planted shrubs and trees, so I chose one of the three narrow paths slicing through and traversed to the other side, where I sat on a slotted bench beneath a cherry blossom tree in full bloom. There was barely anyone sharing the park with me—just a heavy-set African woman reading the newspaper and an older gentleman in a tie, hooked up to an oxygen machine, just sitting, enjoying the day. I eyed my Parisian specimen. The lining was sturdier than those back home; more of a paper cup with a thick lip than a wrapper. But otherwise, with its fastidiously swirled frosting and sprinkling of pistachio pieces, it looked like it could have been from one of New York’s best bakeries. Here goes nothing, I thought.

I bit into my first Parisian cupcake. The cake was moist. The raspberry center was bright and jammy. The frosting was thick—not too much so—and savory more than sweet, the cream cheese adding just the right hint of sourness. I took a second bite and a third. It was an unforgivably delicious combination of flavors, textures, and surprises. Relief flooded me.

So there I was, alone again. But this time I was in Paris. I had come a long way from a lonely eight-year-old and a newbie New Yorker trying to find her way. I had so much to be grateful for and even more to look forward to. Nearly three decades after my love affair with cupcakes began, I sat deconstructing a small piece of cake, amazed that even now it could instill such peace, happiness, and a belief that everything was going to be okay.

More Sweet Spots on the Map

New Yorkers talk out of both sides of their mouths—even when they’re cramming them full of fist-sized bits of cake slathered in buttercream frosting. As “over” cupcakes as everyone purportedly is, you can still find them on practically every block. Beyond Magnolia, Buttercup, Billy’s, and Sugar Sweet Sunshine, which all have similar sugary repertoires, check out Butter Lane, The Spot, and Tu-Lu’s in the East Village; Out of the Kitchen and Sweet Revenge in the West Village; Babycakes on the Lower East Side; Baked by Melissa in Soho; Lulu in Chelsea; and Two Little Red Hens on the Upper East Side. Or just stand on a street corner and eventually they’ll come to you—cupcake trucks, like CupCake Stop, are also now prolific.

Is Paris far behind? It’s doubtful. The longer I was there, the more cupcakeries sprouted up like pretty springtime crocuses. In addition to Cupcakes & Co., there is Berko, an American-style French bakery with outposts in the tourist-friendly Marais and Montmartre quartiers, serving circus-like flavors such as banana and Nutella, tarte tatin, and Oreo. Across town in Saint-Germain, Synie’s Cupcakes takes the elegant route with chocolate ganache, lemon ginger, and dulce de leche with sea salt. Cupcakes are even infiltrating traditional boulangeries (such as the seventh arrondissement’s Moulin de la Vierge), gelaterias (Il Gelato in Saint-Germain), and Anglo-American eateries (H.A.N.D. in the 1er). Throwing a soirée or just feeling especially gluttonous? Batches of custom-order cupcakes are gladly supplied by Sugar Daze and Sweet Pea Baking, two American bakers who have been supplying Parisians with frosting-topped treats for years.