Cupcakes & Co
Burbank, CA
Cupcakes & Co is located in an urban strip mall, directly across the street from the Burbank Town Center Mall. As long as you don't attempt to go on a Friday or Saturday evening, there is plenty of parking available in the parking garage across the street. The store itself is minimalist and trendy, with soothing acrylic paneling on the walls and a counter to ceiling glass display case. We found the store empty except for the owner, who was very helpful in describing all of the flavors.
Well, either Cupcakes & Co was having a bad opening week, or Baron was totally on crack, because I didn't think the cupcakes were that bad. In fact, my only major complaint about Cupcakes & Co (aside from the one rancid cupcake I had) was the fact that their website is totally broken, and has been broken ever since they appeared on my radar back in February. I didn't get a chance to write down the cute names of the cupcakes we purchased while we were in the store, and by the time we got back to my best friend's house I'd already forgotten them. The names (and prices) aren't listed on the website, so I just used descriptive ones:
The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate was made up of chocolate cake with chocolate chips baked inside, a layer of cream cheese, chocolate frosting, and a mound of white and milk chocolate shavings. The cake was fairly flavorless and the layer of frosting was really thin, so most of the flavor came from the chocolate shavings, which gave it a milk chocolate taste. The layer of cream cheese was also really sparse, but added a lot of richness to the cake in the couple of bites it was in. Good, but nothing special, and not worth the steep $3 price tag despite the jumbo muffin size.
With vanilla cake filled with vanilla pudding topped with vanilla buttercream, this cupcake is like the Vanilla version of "death by chocolate". The cake was soft and sweet with a bold vanilla flavor, but the super buttery frosting and greasy pudding dominated the texture, making for a goopy confection. A decent attempt at a "rich" vanilla cupcake, but too buttery and greasy for my tastes.
A bite of this Carrot Cake cupcake left me quite startled -- it had a cloying alcoholic flavor to it that reminded me of my old college friend's attempts to ferment fruit juice. The strangling sweetness lingered after I finished the bite, leaving this weird, yeasty aftertaste on my tongue. The goopy frosting seemed half melted, and tasted like sweet cream cheese that had been sitting out at room temperature and had started to go bad. It had a gross, rancid aftertaste to it. Overall this cupcake tasted like rancid dairy, with an aftertaste of spice cake and cream cheese.
This Banana Peanut Butter cupcake was composed of banana cake topped with peanut butter buttercream. The cake was soft, chewy, and moist, with a sweet banana flavor. At first I thought it was missing something, like butter or oil, until I realized it really was banana cake, and not banana bread. I really enjoyed the peanut butter flavor of the light and fluffy frosting, but found it way too buttery for my taste. There was also way too much of it for the amount of cake, and I ended up scraping 2/3 of it off. Overall a yummy cupcake, but nothing spectacular.The next day Baron and I headed off to Disney's California Adventure theme park, where we successfully survived an earthquake while on a ride. Baron, who works for Disney, mentioned that he remembered seeing cupcakes in a bakery at the Magic Kingdom. Since Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom are nearly identical, we decided to pop over to Disneyland and see if we could find some of the happiest cupcakes on Earth. You would think that the Blue Ribbon Bakery on Main Street would be a good place to look:
Candy Palace
Disneyland, Anaheim CA
As its name implies, the Candy Palace is a confectionary and primarily sells sweets and candies, though there is a display case in the center housing a small collection of baked goods, including cupcakes. The pricing metric at the Candy Palace is rather bizarre -- regular sized vanilla and chocolate cupcakes are $2.50, but strawberry or lemon cake (topped with a plastic trinket) will cost you an extra $0.75. "Supreme" (jumbo muffin sized) strawberry and lemon cupcakes are $4.00 -- everything really is twice as expensive at Disneyland. Baron and I opted to be cheap, settling for regular old vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. There's no seating in the Candy Palace, and the ice cream shop next door was packed, so we carried our cupcakes to an outdoor patio at the end of the block.
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The next night my best friend, his fiance, and I drove down to San Diego to begin on-site wedding preparations. On Thursday evening we managed to squeeze in a quick trip to Eclipse Chocolat between errands. I had excitedly followed their blog throughout their Cupcake Extravaganza over Fourth of July Weekend. In an effort to nail down the best creme-fraiche cupcake menu possible, Eclipse Chocolat offered thirty-six flavors that weekend and a special buy-2-get-1-free price. Anyone who offered feedback was entered into a raffle for one free box of cupcakes every week for two months. They ended up selling over 1200 cupcakes that weekend. Crazy!
We arrived at Eclipse Chocolat an hour before closing. The sole employee was already helping a woman at the counter so we killed the time by wandering around the cafe and examining all of the chocolates in the display case. No sign of any cupcakes, though they were featured prominently on the menu. Hmm...maybe they keep them in the back? Finally, 10 minutes after we arrived, the employee was ready to assist us. I asked her if she had any cupcakes and she said no, that the owner had only baked a half-batch that day. What? Argh! How could they only be baking half-batches after having such a successful cupcake weekend?!
Defeated, we left empty handed. My best friend tried to cheer me up, promising that we could try again the next morning. I told him that his wedding was the priority, not cupcakes, but he insisted. I called at 9:20 the next morning, twenty minutes after they opened, to make sure they had some cupcakes on hand. The friendly man who answered the phone told me he was currently baking them, but estimated they'd be all sold out in an hour and a half. Uh, what? If you knew you were going to sell out in ninety minutes, why the heck wouldn't you bake more?!? Confused, we decided to skip Eclipse Chocolat, and opted to head straight to Cupcakes Squared instead.
Cupcakes Squared
San Diego, CA
Located three miles from the San Diego airport, Cupcakes Squared was the perfect way to kill an hour between picking up two people from the airport. They're housed in a strip mall so parking was easy and plentiful. Although the suburban-trendy bakery is quite large, much of it is taken up by a huge industrial kitchen. If it wasn't clear from the name, Cupcakes Squared's "gimmick" is that all of their cupcakes are shaped like cubes:
Anyway, on the plus side, the square shape of the cupcakes allows them to sit snugly against each other in the box, preventing them from sliding around in transport. The cupcakes are also quite a bit larger than your standard sized cupcake, and given how delicious they are, the $2.75 price is a total steal.
Named after the species of passionfruit used in its frosting, the Lilikoi is made up of vanilla cake topped with passionfruit buttercream. The vanilla cake was moist and buttery with a sweet vanilla flavor that had a bit of a citrus tang to it. The frosting was an exceptionally light and fluffy Italian Meringue buttercream with a super buttery flavor and a nice tart tang. Together they made for an incredibly delicious cupcake; my only complaint is that it was too buttery -- the cake was oozing butter and the frosting tasted like tart whipped butter.
With proportions that are somewhat opposite of your typical slice of cheesecake, this Cheesecake! cupcake is comprised of graham cracker cake topped with lemon mascarpone frosting. The cake tasted just like the vanilla cake in the Lilikoi, but with a subtle graham cracker flavor instead of a citrus tang. Both this cake and the vanilla cake had the same moist, almost sticky texture as traditional carrot cake, making me wonder if Cupcakes Squared uses an oil-based recipe for their cakes. The frosting was super light and fluffy with a sweet cream cheese flavor. Overall the cupcake was delicious, but it tasted more like the cupcake version of a frosted cookie than a slice of cheesecake.
The chocoholic in me couldn't resist the Chocolate^2 -- french chocolate cake topped with chocolate buttercream. The cake was incredibly moist (especially for a chocolate cake) with a slightly bitter, rich dark chocolate flavor. The frosting was super light and fluffy with a super rich, buttery dark chocolate flavor. Delicious, but a bit too buttery for my taste. Combined they made for a decadent chocolate confection that was more rich than sweet. Yum!
If I hadn't read the sign, I never would've guessed this was a "Red" Velvet cupcake. It seems that Cupcakes Squared added the cocoa powder to the vanilla cake batter, just as in a traditional red velvet cake, but didn't add the red food coloring. I totally approve -- I'm often turned off by the super bright, artificial red color of red velvet cake. The cake was moist and buttery with a mild "red velvet" (cocoa) flavor, and the frosting tasted like the exact same one on the Cheesecake!. When eaten together the cake and frosting made for an incredibly moist and rich red velvet cupcake. I'm not usually a red velvet fan, but I found this cupcake super yummy.
The exotic Pistachio Pomegranate consists of pistachio cake topped with pomegranate frosting. The cake was moist and slightly sweet with a predominantly buttery taste, though the chopped pistachios in the cake added bursts of nutty flavor. The fluffy buttercream had a three-stage flavor -- initially the taste was buttery and sweet, followed by a fruity flavor, and lastly a tangy bite. The cupcake was buttery and fruity -- the flavor of pistachios was lost in the mix, but that was fine by me. Overall this cupcake was really good, but way too buttery.Initially my plan was to fly back to Pittsburgh from San Diego on Sunday afternoon, but when I got the opportunity to change my ticket so that I departed from LA on Monday morning, I jumped on it. The grand opening of Johnny Cupcakes' LA store was that weekend, and I'd been really bummed that I was going to be so close, and yet still miss it. Baron and I quickly made plans to meet up Sunday afternoon and hit some of the LA cupcakeries I wasn't able to get to earlier in the week, as well as Johnny Cupcakes. My goal was to make it up to LA by 2pm, but unfortunately my ride left a couple hours late and I didn't make it until 6pm. I'd called the LA cupcakeries several weeks prior to confirm operating hours and a couple of them didn't close until 7pm, so we decided to gun it.
Our first stop was Eat My Cupcake, and it was totally closed. Argh! We raced back to the car and zoomed over to Famous Cupcakes which was also closed. Double argh! The store hours on their window indicated they should be open, but there was a little piece of paper taped to it indicating they were now closed on Sundays. They must've changed their store hours since I called them. Sigh.
I know what you are thinking, "Violet, calling weeks in advance isn't good enough, you should've called the day before, or the same day." You're totally right. Luckily, visiting Johnny Cupcakes hadn't been part of my original LA plan, so when I found out I'd be able to go I asked Baron to call and make sure they'd still be open. Baron called them at 3pm and they said they'd be open until 8pm. You can imagine our surprise when we showed up at 6:47pm and found the store like this:
Crumbs Bake Shop
Beverly Hills, CA
The last time I got to sample cupcakes from Crumbs was almost two years ago, at one of their New York locations. I still rave to my friends about how great those cupcakes were, and so I was super excited when we walked up and discovered that they were still open. The Beverly Hills store was a bit smaller than the NY branch I'd been to -- there wasn't any seating, but the display case was huge and bursting with cupcakes. Baron and I each tried one of the free mini samples while we pondered the selection -- the blueberry crumb cake mini I had was phenomenal.
The cheerful Pineapple Passion is constructed of vanilla cake with pineapple filling topped with pineapple frosting. The vanilla cake was fairly dry with a buttery vanilla flavor that wasn't very sweet. The frosting was super super sugary with a strongly artificial taste of pineapple. It tasted kind of like the syrup left over in cans of pineapple or fruit cups. Not exactly my cup of tea. The pineapple filling tasted like crushed pineapple that had been suspended in a thick, sugary syrup -- it had the same sweet, tinny flavor of pineapple that comes out of a can. The predominant flavor of this cupcake was "sweet" with a secondary flavor of canned pineapple. It wasn't exactly inedible, but definitely wasn't what I was expecting -- I had assumed it would be made with fresh pineapple.
The Snickers is made up of chocolate cake with nougat filling topped with chocolate frosting. The super crumbly (almost entropically unstable) chocolate cake had a mild, unobtrusive chocolate flavor. The chocolate frosting was extremely sugary and far too sweet with a mild milk chocolate flavor. It was so sweet that it hurt my teeth! The nougat was sweet and buttery -- it kind of tasted like the nougat in Snickers bars, but much, much sweeter. (Noticing a theme here?) Overall, the flavor of this cupcake was sweet and chocolatey, and fairly generic. What made it a "Snickers" cupcake as opposed to a "chocolate" cupcake? The nougat filling? What about nuts, or caramel, the other two major components of a Snickers bar?These cupcakes were much, much different than the ones I remembered from New York. Specifically, they were much, much sweeter. It's almost as if the Beverly Hills Crumbs is a hybrid of the NY Crumbs and Yummy Cupcakes. What gives? Do LA-ers have much stronger sweet tooths (teeth?) than New Yorkers?
Anyway, that was my trip to Southern California. If you made it this far you totally win a cookie! Stay tuned for my writeup of my recent trip to Baltimore.
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