Anne Hathaway's Cupcake Hack Is Not How I Want To Eat Cupcakes

Anne Hathaway is many things—Academy Award–winning actress, Lip Sync Battle champ, and all-around sweetheart—but a cupcake innovator she is not. The actress recently appeared on The Kelly Clarkson Show, where she participated in a singing contest and wowed both Clarkson and the audience with a "hack" for eating cupcakes, reports People. Hathaway is not the originator of this hack, but more importantly, it's not that great of a trick to begin with. Watch her demonstrate it at the 50-second mark in the video below.

Both Hathaway and Clarkson chat with cupcakes in hand as Hathaway explains how dumbfounded she usually leaves people when she shows them this little trick. She uses one hand to hold the top of her cupcake (claw-handed from the top, to avoid touching the frosting) while her other hand rips the bottom half of the cupcake away. She then flips the top half over so that the frosting is sandwiched between the two halves of the cupcake. Holding the cupcake with both hands, she takes a bite like it's a burger. The audience gasps and applauds.

"I've never seen anyone do this, but it reminds me of a whoopie pie," Clarkson says, trying it out herself.

Genius! you might think. But I beg to differ. With all due respect to Anne Hathaway (truly, she's a talented performer with tons of charm and a long list of accomplishments), this cupcake hack just makes you work harder for less payoff.

First of all, ripping the cupcake in half like that leads to many more crumbs than if you had just bit into it in the normal way. What if you don't make a clean tear? What if a big chunk of your cupcake goes flying into the grass? You risk a lot of lost dessert this way. To really rip into the cupcake the way Hathaway demonstrates, you have to remove the cupcake liner completely, meaning you've surrendered your safety net for catching all those crumbs.

Secondly, this method requires committing to eating your cupcake with two hands. Usually, beyond peeling back the liner, cupcakes can be eaten one-handed—or zero-handed, if you choose to attack it with a fork on a plate.

"You don't get frosting up your nose!" Hathaway says of her cupcake trick. But was the whole frosting-up-the-nose problem a big issue before now?

When each woman takes a bite, frosting squishes dangerously out the sides of the sandwich. I can picture frosting falling out onto some expensive shoes.

Hathaway is most definitely not the first to do this hack, so I'm surprised by how many people around her, Kelly Clarkson included, haven't seen this little trick before. Not that this is necessarily a common Google search, but if you just type in "How to eat a cupcake" you'll find articles and videos going as far back as 2012 with this exact method. Someone on The Takeout staff confirms a Girl Scout leader showed them this cupcake eating method in approximately 1999.

Everyone has a right to enjoy their cupcakes as they please! Depending on where the cupcake came from, sometimes I scrape off the frosting completely and just enjoy the cake part. I'm just saying that Anne Hathaway's cupcake eating hack doesn't track for me. Are you into it?

In the fictional words of the princess of Genovia, let them eat cupcakes.