Having already cleared one checkpoint and flown across the country with her sweet treat, Rebecca Hains of Peabody, Massachusetts, lost her cupcake to a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official in Las Vegas who insisted the frosting constituted a suspicious substance.

 

Hains, a communications professor at Salem State University, flew last week from Boston to Las Vegas without incident while carrying two red velvet cupcakes, each packaged in an 8-ounce glass mason jar, from Wicked Good Cupcakes. But before she boarded her return flight at McCarron International Airport, a TSA inspector confiscated her one remaining cupcake because it resembled a “gel-like substance” that violated federal safety rules and “it was in a container in which it conformed to the container’s shape.”

 

“I offered to take it out and put it in a zip-lock bag on the spot and he said, ‘no, I can’t let you touch it,’” Hains told WHDH News in Boston. “So once he had identified it as a security threat it was no longer mine and I couldn’t have it back.”

 

Fortunately, Wicked Good promised to send Hains a replacement cupcake.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

TSA Confiscates Cupcake from Peabody Woman (WHDH News)

Frightening Frosting? TSA Confiscates Cupcake (NBC News, MSNBC.com, Associated Press)