Baltimore Cupcake Crawl

A couple of weeks ago I headed down to Baltimore for my cousin's wedding.  (It's totally wedding season.)  The first event wasn't until 7pm, but I arrived around 3pm so that I could spend a couple of hours hanging out with my friend Nate and reattempting a Baltimore Cupcake Crawl.  (My first attempt last winter failed horribly.)  This time I called all of the cupcakeries (except the one I didn't have a number for) immediately before we left the house.  See, I can learn!  Our first stop was Charm City Cupcakes:

Charm City Cupcakes
Baltimore, MD
The first time we tried to find Charm City Cupcakes, it took us quite awhile to realize that it was located inside a small indoor shopping mall type thing called "Brown's Arcade".  (The street number isn't printed on the front of the arcade, and we eventually found it by parking the car and then just walking up and down the block until we determined the arcade must be it by process of elimination.)  CCC itself is just a small, walk-up bakery counter, but there's a beautiful indoor brick courtyard just next to it that would make a wonderful place to sit and eat a cupcake if only there were some tables and chairs in it.  (Hint, hint.)
When I called, the friendly gentleman who answered the phone informed me he only had seven cupcakes left.  Yikes!  I had him set three aside for me, but when we showed up at the store my friend Nate decided he wanted to try a fourth one as well.  We carried our cupcakes to an outdoor food court a block away and ate them under an ominously dark and cloudy sky.  Luckily, it didn't start raining.

This beautiful Vanilla Chocolate cupcake gave off a chocolatey aroma that reminded me of Cadbury bars.  The delicate cake was soft and crumbly with a sweet refreshing flavor that reminded me of angel food cake.  The sugary chocolate frosting was super thick and fudgy, with a rich milk chocolate flavor.  I really enjoyed the texture of the delicate cake paired with the fudgy frosting -- the cake to frosting ratio was perfect.

As the super friendly gentleman explained to me several times, the drizzles on top of this Chocolate Vanilla cupcake were made from Ghirardelli chocolate.  Yum!  The chocolate cake was super moist with a subtle chocolate flavor that tasted more like like "chocolate cake" than chocolate cake, if that makes sense.  (Like how "grape" flavored candy has a different taste than actual grapes.)  The sugary vanilla frosting was thick and sweet -- too sweet for my tastes.  When combined with the cake it made for a confection that tasted primarily "sweet" with a hint of the "chocolate cake" flavor peeking through.  Not bad, but nothing special.

This spiky Turtle cupcake was comprised of caramel filled chocolate cake topped with chocolate frosting and a spoonful of caramel-coated pecans.  The chocolate cake tasted exactly like the one used in the Chocolate Vanilla, but a bit more buttery, while the chocolate frosting tasted exactly like the one on the Vanilla Chocolate.  Overall the cupcake tasted rich and chocolatey, with a faint hint of caramel in the bites that had the caramel filling in it.  The nuts added a nice crunch to the texture, and their flavor lingered in the aftertaste of the cupcake.  It was the perfect amount of nuts texture and flavor wise, and the frosting to cake ratio was spot on.

This Chocolate Mint cupcake was constructed from chocolate cake filled with mint mousse topped with chocolate frosting.  Unsurprisingly, the chocolate cake and frosting tasted exactly like the ones found in the other cupcakes.  The mousse was sugary, yet smooth, with a strong peppermint flavor.  Something about the texture and flavor reminded me of Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream from Baskin Robbins.  Delicious!  Eaten as a whole, the cupcake was sweet and minty with a hint of chocolate; the mint mousse totally dominated the flavor.  The sweet mousse combined with the sugary frosting made for a very sweet cupcake, a bit too sweet for me.  The cupcake left a strong taste of mint and sweetness in my mouth for minutes after I finished eating it -- a great dessert for a date! ; )

After finishing our cupcakes from CCC, we hopped back into the car and headed over to the Inner Harbor to see if we could find the Perfect Cupcakes truck.  It's supposed to parked in front of the Marine Biotechnology Center from 11:30-7:30 Mon-Wed, but we did three loops around the center and didn't see it.  Sad.  We continued on to our next stop, Baltimore Cupcake Company.

Baltimore Cupcake Company
Baltimore, MD
Baltimore Cupcake Company was actually the first non-Pittsburgh cupcakery I ever visited, back in March 2007.  I was driving from my parents' house in Virginia back to Pittsburgh and I swung by Baltimore (not at all on the way) just so I could meet up with Mister Mixer and check out the BCC.  We were both surprised when we stepped inside the store and discovered that it was gorgeous.  And pink.  Not just pink, but pink.  And full of merchandise.  In fact, it took me awhile to spot the cupcakes on the counter in the back, behind a whole store full of pink baking accoutrements and little girls clothes.  Mister had his professional camera with him and asked the woman behind the counter if he could take pictures for the Johns Hopkins grad student newspaper.  She said no.  In fact, she answered all of my questions with one-word answers until I asked her if she had any forks.  She promptly replied, "Forks?!?  Just shove 'em in your mouth like God intended!"  Yeesh!  Properly chastised, Mister and I took our box of cupcakes and ran.  Despite the large size of the store there wasn't any seating, so we ended up at one of his favorite coffee shops where we enjoyed the cupcakes with some nice hot chocolate.  We later decided that all of the secrecy and abruptness was probably due to the store being a front for the black market trade of dangerous pastry tips and illegal nonpareils.

This time, my friend Nate and I fared a little better.  The woman behind the counter was quite nice, and gave us permission to take some photos:
Still full from the four cupcakes we'd just eaten, we limited ourselves to two of Baltimore Cupcake Company's ginormous cupcakes.  (Nate is so good at restraining me -- if it had been just up to me, I would've gotten three.)

The enormous size and substantial heft of the Neapolitan made the $3 price tag a bit more palatable.  Seriously, I don't think I can describe just how heavy this cupcake was -- I bet I could've used it as a weapon.  From visual inspection, this cupcake appeared to be strawberry-vanilla swirled cake topped with a layer of chocolate frosting and then a layer of vanilla frosting.  I'm not the world's biggest fan of strawberry baked goods, but I couldn't pass up the super cute Neapolitan Hershey's Kiss on top of this cupcake.

The first hint that something was amiss with this cupcake was its aroma -- it smelled just like Play-doh.  One bite of the cake revealed that it also tasted exactly like the way Play-doh smells.  Gross!  After a few seconds I could detect an aftertaste of artificial strawberry, but that's as good as it got.  My first reaction was that there was something wrong with my tastebuds -- there's no way a cake that foul would ever make it out of a professional kitchen -- so I asked Nate to taste it.  His reaction was "Wow!  That is NOT a tasty cake!".  No kidding.

The amount of frosting piled on top of the cake was patently ridiculous.  A quick check with my trusty ruler revealed that both the cake and the frosting had the same height -- 1.5".  The chocolate frosting was super rich, with an extremely thick texture and a sweet milk chocolate flavor.  It was so thick that it pretty much had the consistency of sugary fudge.  The vanilla frosting, on the other hand, was nearly inedible.  It was just as thick and sugary, but didn't have any flavor other than "nauseatingly sweet".  Totally gross.

When eaten together, the cake and frosting tasted like Play-doh with about a pound of sugar added.  The aftertaste was even worse -- it was more artificial and plasticy.  At the end of the day, this cupcake was pretty putrescent -- hands down the worst cupcake I've ever had (and I've eaten almost 300 gourmet cupcakes at this point).  Flavor issues aside, the balance of this cupcake was all out of whack.  Saying that there was too much frosting for the amount of cake would be a huge understatement.  I still can't believe I paid money to eat this -- this definitely tasted like something that your friends pay you to eat, on a dare.  I'm going to give Baltimore Cupcake Company the benefit of the doubt and assume that there was something wrong with this batch, and that this wasn't what the Neapolitan normally tastes like.  Even so, I think that the BCC should engage in more product testing -- this batch should've never made it out to the counter.

The decadent looking Toasted Marshmallow is comprised of marshmallow-creme filled chocolate cake topped with chocolate frosting, a toasted marshmallow, and chocolate drizzles.  As I picked up the cupcake to unwrap it, melted marshmallow and chocolate oozed out of the top.  Unwrapping it was a huge mistake -- the hollow cake couldn't take the weight of the thick frosting, and the cupcake immediately collapsed in on itself.  Cutting it in half to split it with my friend Nate didn't help the situation; all of the marshmallow-creme filling oozed out of the cupcake, causing it to collapse further.  Oh well, my tongue and tummy don't care what the cupcake looks like!

The chocolate cake was oily in texture with an artificial flavor that was more like "chocolate cake" than chocolate cake.  (Like how "grape" candy tastes different than actual grapes.)  The thick chocolate frosting fudge topping tasted just like the one on the Neapolitan, but even sweeter (if that's possible).   It was so sugary that it was crunchy, and had an overly sweet milk chocolate flavor that reminded me a lot of Magnolia's frosting.  There was only half an inch of frosting, though, giving the overall confection a much more balanced frosting to cake ratio.  The marshmallow-creme filling tasted more like Cadbury creme egg filling, but way too sweet.  (Noticing a trend here?)

The overall flavor of the cupcake was super sweet, chemical-like chocolate.  Gross.  The marshmallow on top provided some much needed "not-sweet" flavor, but it wasn't enough to balance out the super sweet filling and sugar-laden frosting.  After a couple of bites I scraped all the chocolate frosting off the cake, scooped out as much of the marshmallow-creme filling as possible, and just ate the cake with the toasted marshmallow.  That reduced the sweetness to a tolerable level instead of a gag-inducing level.  Ultimately I think this cupcake could be salvaged if the filling was omitted and the sugar content of the frosting was halved.

I think something definitely changed in the eighteen months since my last visit to Baltimore Cupcake Company.  I remember really enjoying their cupcakes, but it seems in the intervening time the cupcakes have gotten quite a bit bigger, $0.50 more expensive, and a million times sweeter.  I hope the cupcakes I had on this trip were a fluke -- the "old" ones were super yummy!

Well, that wraps up my trip to Baltimore.  Thanks for reading!