So he let me bite his arm. 

I’m still kind of out of it, but I’m pleased to say that the attempts at spousal cannibalism have become far more infrequent since that episode. I’m going to try and get my bearings over the next few days. In the meantime, I’ll be posting about a few trips that we had prior to South Africa, that I haven’t gotten around to telling you about. Enjoy.)

-

-

Like any good alchemist, I spend a lot of time at home trying to turn lead into gold. Or, more precisely, flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and a bit of vanilla into cake.

Same thing, basically.

I usually have more than a modicum of success at it. I’ve become a pretty accomplished baker over the years (and an even more accomplished eater).

But every now and then, I have a misstep. Last weekend, I attempted to make some oatmeal butterscotch cookies. And while the chemistry behind my error eludes me, I will say this: they did not turn out as planned. Rather than form anything remotely resembling a cookie, they spread out and fused together into a thin lattice.

I pulled the cookie tray out of the oven and stared at my failure. I poked at it feebly with a fork.

And then I figured, what the hell, I might as well try a bite. It was either that or the trash. I gently forked up a morsel. Then another.

By the time that Rand came into the kitchen and found me there, the pan was already half consumed.

He stared at me for a moment. I opened my mouth to say something. To try to explain to him that contrary to appearances, I did have some degree of willpower. That I was better than this. Really.

But before anything came out (remember, my mouth was full of butterscotch-flavored failure), Rand grabbed a fork and polished off the rest of the tray.

God, I adore him.

The point is this: in my love life, I am discerning. In the world of baked goods, I am not always so.

The cupcakes at Georgetown Cupcake in Boston, are on the opposite end of the spectrum as my cookies. The bakery started in D.C., and has several locations, including one on Newbury Street.

-

Their confections are pretty to look at, and hold together nicely. But they aren’t so good as to justify frenzied eating right out of the figurative pan. You will not find yourself, after you’ve finished your cake, pressing your finger against any crumbs that may remain at the bottom of the box.

-

-

Look, none of this stopped me from eating three of them, but I think I’ve made it clear that sometimes I can’t be trusted.

The shop is adorable, nestled in the row of brick buildings that line Newbury street, blending in so well that the storefront would be easy to miss. The line is formidable, and it’s best to get the cakes to go, since there’s not much seating inside.

-

The cakes have a dense, grainy crumb (think cornbread), a feature which I’m not opposed to. They aren’t terribly large, but are on the expensive side. Half a dozen cupcakes set me back about $20. The frosting was thick and almost gummy – many of the vanilla variants were cream-cheese based.

I wasn’t thoroughly impressed, but a friend who managed to rifle a mocha cupcake away from me declared it one of the best she’d ever had.

Like someone in a doomed relationship, I stuck with it, hoping things would improve. I took bite after bite, thinking, “This next one will be better.”

It wasn’t.

It’s not that I would advise you to steer clear of Georgetown cupcake – it’s just that I felt somewhat let down. The cute storefront, the adorable boxes … all of that built me up, while the cupcakes themselves fell flat.

There was a lesson to be learned here – within a few days, it was practically screaming at me. We were in Chinatown, and Rand told me that he’d heard there was a good cake shop nearby (I know I said it before in this post, but it bears repeating: I adore him).

The facade of Eldo Cake House was not particularly noticeable. The interior was equally forgettable.

-

The desserts were simple, and ridiculously cheap. $2.00 for a generous slice of spongy cake, filled with fruits and cream. $0.80 for a rolled slice of cake with cream filling.

-

Having been burned before by Boston’s dessert scene, I took a tentative taste. Yes. Yes, this was going to work.

“Do you want a bite?” I said to Rand, though I made no move to offer him one.

He nodded. “It’s cool,” he said. I’ll grab my own fork. A wise decision, as I showed no signs of relinquishing mine.

-

He wasn’t gone long. Perhaps a 10 seconds. Maybe 15. And while it was not my intention, by the time he returned, the cake was gone.

“Should we get another slice?” I asked, somewhat guiltily. Rand merely smiled and shook his head. He knew as well as I, that had we ordered another piece, he probably wouldn’t get to try that one, either.

Because sometimes it’s now how your dessert looks. It’s how it tastes, as you quickly mash it down your gullet, in moves so quick, they look like a blur.

I might have overdone it on cupcakes when I was last in New York. I know: those words sound blasphemous, don’t they? Even as I try to type them, my fingers burn a little. If I attempt to utter the phrase, “I’ve had too many cupcakes” out loud, it sears my throat. Clearly, my body does not want me to admit to it, but admit to it I must: there is such a thing as too many cupcakes. Very simply, if you eat more cakes than you spend days in a city, you will get yourself into trouble.

And that is precisely what I did.

Of course, I regret nothing. After all, I had to fulfill my journalistic obligations, which were, to the best of my understanding, to eat every single cupcake I came across.

Yup. Every single one. If I saw a cupcake, I bought it. In New York City, where the homeless population has largely been replaced with bakery trucks (seriously? Movable cupcake repositories? I think I dreamt that idea up once in fifth grade. I never thought it would actually happen), such an endeavor is dangerous one. Even if you try to set up strict guidelines to avoid consuming enough sugar to take down an elephant (like, say, only eating cupcakes that directly cross your path), it’s still a risky game. After just a few blocks, you may find yourself in the throes of a diabetic coma, nonsensical babble pouring forth from your frosting smeared lips.

I was more animal than human.

-

But I pressed on, in the name of … I don’t know, science? Yes (that sounds far better than “gluttony”). Here are my findings:

Cupcakes by Melissa:

I stumbled across this small cupcake stand while walking around SoHo with Rand.

“Do you want to try those?” he turned to ask me, but I was already navigating the line, trying to cut in front of a little girl and her grandmother (I am a monster). The premise behind Melissa’s shop is a fascinating one: she crafts teeny tiny stuffed cupcakes so that you can sample a half dozen or so without 1.) dying or 2.) inflating your fundament to a size that cannot be contained in your skinny jeans. They’re inexpensive, and you can experience slightly less shame than you normally would when confessing that you devoured six cakes by yourself.

Friend: “You ate HOW MANY of them? They mini-cupcakes, right?”

Me: “Um … sure.”

We got two red velvets, and one each tie-dye, mint-chocolate chip, chocolate peanut butter, and chocolate-chip pancake (of which I was wary, but the girl behind the counter declared it her favorite).

Rand's hand might have been bitten in the tasting process.

-

The cupcakes were moist (even, perhaps, a bit oily) but according a lot of Yelp reviewers, the small size means that a lot of batches risk being too dry (there’s a joke here … give me a minute). I enjoyed the red velvet and tie-dye, even though the the latter was merely a vanilla cake that had been soaked in a spectrum of artificial colors. The rest weren’t bad, but they almost ventured a bit too far into candy territory with their flavors and fillings. As a child of the 80s and 90s, who grew up eating Gushers instead of fruit, this wasn’t entirely a problem for me. More sophisticated palettes would no doubt be horrified.

What? Don't judge me.

Verdict: They’re kind of like that guy you slept with junior year of college. They fulfilled a specific need at the time, but unless you are feeling truly desperate or drunk, you are unlikely to ever go back.

—————————

The Sweetery, NYC

I’m slightly wary of eating food from trucks. It just seems like a bad idea to trust a chef who has his own getaway vehicle. I’m convinced I’ll open a pastry box and it will be filled with an apple and a note that reads, “Sucker!” and before I can complain, they’ll have disappeared down 5th avenue in a puff of exhaust. And I am so not chasing after them.

Meh.

-

While the Sweetery didn’t insult me by giving me fruit or something else equally reprehensible, I was utterly disappointed in their cupcakes. I tried both the chocolate and the red velvet. The cakes of both were middling – not bad, and fairly moist. The chocolate was covered with runny, flavorless frosting that was like lukewarm butter. The cream cheese frosting tasted way too tart (like they had just dolloped a bit of Philadelphia spread straight from the tub and called it good).

Hated it!

But the real indication of my disappointment? I finished neither. I took a bite of each, and deposited what remained neatly a top a trash can, should someone else less fortunate in life and less picky in cupcakes wish to try them.

Verdict: If they improved their frosting, they might stand a chance. As is? No way.

—————————

Cupcake Stop Truck

After the utter disappointment of Sweetery NYC, you’d think that perhaps I’d have learned my lesson about food trucks, or at the very least, that I’d begun to question the idea of eatin my way through the hand-held gateaus of New York.

And I can resolutely answer: Not at all. I was still as dedicated to the cause as I had ever been.

It might have even been that my husband was telling me about some exciting developments in his own career when we had this exchange:

Rand: “And … you aren’t even listening to me, are you?”

Me: “Hmmm …?”

Rand: “You’re just staring at that cupcake truck. You don’t even care that I’m here.”

Me: “Babe, that’s not true. I care about your success a lot.”

Rand: “Because it enables you to buy more cupcakes.”

Me: “Well, yeah … I thought that was obvious.”

I still do love you, guy who brings me cupcakes and sleeps in my bed.

-

Granted, Cupcake Stop was the most specious-looking shop that I had yet encountered: the 70s-era truck with an anthropomorphic cupcake on the side of it was in no way instilling me with confidence. But, as science was at stake, I pressed on, and found a cupcake almost as kitchy in appearance as the truck it rode in on.

Ignore the Anthropologie bag in the background. I am a creature of many vices.

-

Having so adored pre-packaged Hostess cupcakes in my youth, there was no way I could resist this homemade riff on the original. It even had the cream filling.

-

Verdict: Fantastic. I didn’t try their other flavors (and the reviews I read were middling at best), but this one was clearly proof that you can’t judge a cake by its truck.

—————————

Billy’s Bakery Cupcakes

A while back, when I went to Billy’s for the first time, I found it was barely a whisper on the lips of most New Yorkers. They seemed afraid to utter its named aloud, fearful that their secret neighborhood bakeshop would be overrun with tourists. The quality would suffer, and Billy’s would go the way of Magnolia Bakery and so many others before it. I tried their cupcakes and was fairly pleased – though I found the frosting lacked a bit of height (seriously, folks, if Ashley Rodriguez has taught me nothing else, it’s this: dessert is nothing without salt. Also, marry a dark-haired man and you will be happy.) The cake, though, was moist and perfect.

This time around, when some friends insisted we visit Billy’s after dinner (and maybe, just maybe, they insisted because I had been whining about cupcakes throughout dinner), I found that the frosting had improved. But the cake had gotten worse.

Pretty, yes? But not all lovely things have substance.

-

They were so dry, they crumbled into dust upon each bite. It was tragic, really. Not to say that I didn’t eat most of them that night, in desperate bites consumed in the privacy of our hotel room (What? A good cupcake gone stale is better than a fresh mediocre one. It’s SCIENCE). And it was only as I  scraped the smudged frosting from the lid of the box that I thought, maybe, maybe, I had had enough of New York Cupcakes. Four shops in two days was plenty, wasn’t it? Besides, Boston was on the horizon, and its eponymous cream pie wasn’t going to eat itself.

Verdict: Does it matter what I think of Billy’s? I’m clearly mad. Just scrape off the frosting, smear it on your naked torso, and dance through Chelsea. If you give me enough notice, I may even join you.

“I need cupcakes. Cupcakes for science.” I announced to my husband the other evening.

“That sounds perfectly reasonable,” he replied.

“I need them,” I said.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“SCIENCE!” I screamed.

He nodded. Usually I don’t specify why I want cupcakes. It would be like asking why fish need water, or Berkeley needs drum circles. THEY JUST DO. My existence, he long ago learned, is about the acquisition and consumption of dessert-type foods. I’m eating candy even as I type this (I am not kidding. I would not joke about something like this).

My passion for desserts is not new-found. Behold me (far left) with my brother and cousins, circa 1983:

Every weekend was like Lord of the Flies.

-

Notice how I can’t take my eyes off the cake. Even at that tender young age, my motivations were clear.

This is not to say that my unbridled and all-consuming cake addiction has made me less discerning on the subject. Quite the contrary: when you have, over the years, eaten as much cake as I (roughly 5-7 times the amount an adult human should), you get very, very picky about the matter.

You become a connoisseur.

Which brings me to the evening at hand. As I had explained to my husband, this time my desire for cake was due to a higher purpose – science. The advancement of mankind was at stake. I was about to have a cupcake-off. I figured it was a necessary evolution of all my travels and dessert eating: I’d pair two cupcakes from different shops around the globe against one other, and declare a winner. After all, if I could use my love of cake to help other people, well, isn’t that the greatest achievement anyone could hope to have? Benefiting our society through frosting?

For my first bout, I selected New York’s famed Magnolia Bakery versus Seattle’s own Cupcake Royale.

Why did I pick these two?

Magnolia was an easy choice. Despite having become quite mainstream and popular in recent years (many blame SATC for it), it’s one of the most famous cupcake shops, ever. It had to be a contender in my inaugural bout.  And Cupcake Royale I chose because it’s my favorite cake shop in Seattle, so it’s pretty easy to pop down there and grab cupcakes, all under some thinly-guised premise of conducting an experiment.

Ah, the lies we tell ourselves.

The only hitch was that I couldn’t exactly conduct a side-by-side comparison. I was last at Magnolia Bakery ages ago. I figured this wasn’t really a problem, because I have plenty of photos to document the experience. And I never forget a dessert (my cousin learned this last night, when we were talking about his gelato shop. I remembered, in astonishing detail, past flavors he had created. He looked … alarmed.)

The only rules were these:

• I had to eat the cupcake the day of purchase (yeah, like that’s difficult) lest it get stale and taint the results.
• The entire cake need not be consumed (though really, this is mostly theoretical. A cake has to be truly terrible for me not to eat it. It’s rare, though it has happened).
• Cake and frosting needed to be evaluated together in one bite.

This last point is the most important. I remember once, as a child, being over at the neighbors’ house while they had cupcakes (they didn’t share. Our friendship did not last long). I watched as my friend Leah and her brother, Kevin (how the hell do I remember this? I was five) consumed just the frosting, leaving behind the naked little hockey-puck of yellow cake.

It was madness. Did they not realize what they were doing?

It’s almost as bad as when I see people scraping the frosting off a piece of cake before eating it. THIS IS NOT TO BE DONE, EVER. Frosting and cake need one another other. They are complimentary elements, yin and yang, black and white. The interplay of the two creates something magical – something far greater that the sum of its parts. To disturb this balance is to disrupt the very fabric of our universe.

I’m pretty sure we could trace the origins of global warming to someone scraping the excess frosting off their birthday cake back in 1926.

But I digress. On to the death match. Which isn’t really a death match at all, unless you consider that the loser gets eaten (then again, so does the winner).

——————-

The contenders:

Magnolia Bakery’s traditional vanilla cake with vanilla frosting (which usually comes in a variety of pastel shades. Mine happened to be mint green).

-

Cupcake Royale’s Dance Party with Holly Hobby – a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting:

Photo by the fabulous cakespy, via Flickr.com

-

The judging:

Magnolia’s vanilla/vanilla cupcake is iconic – it’s the cupcake that paved the way for so many others. And it really is quite good. I remember the first time I had one, in the years before cupcake bakeries were on every street corner, I was positively tickled. This time, though, it didn’t quite stand up my memory of it. The frosting is thick and smooth (the temptation to make a joke here is overwhelming), and develops a good crust. The cake is fairly dense and has a solid crumb to it – it’s sturdy, but not overly heavy or gritty (though perhaps a weensy smidge dry). The one odd thing about Magnolia’s cupcakes is that the recipe doesn’t call for any salt in either the batter or the frosting- so there’s nothing to cut the sweetness. The flavor comes off as a little flat as a result. I suspect even half a teaspoon would have given it some much needed depth.

Cupcake Royale’s Dance Party with Holly Hobbie has a similar frosting to Magnolia’s, though I suspect here’s a bit of salt thrown in the mix. For whatever the reason, it doesn’t seem to taste quite as sweet, though the consistency (and tendency to develop a crust) is about the same. The cake itself, though, is entirely different: more of a white cake than yellow, and incredibly moist and spongy (almost reminiscent of angel-food cake – I suspect there are beaten egg whites in the batter). The result is an incredibly light cake which is lovely, but one that almost runs the risk of not holding up to the thick frosting on top.

-

The verdict:

Cupcake Royale was the clear winner of this match. While the cake was a bit too light in texture, the flavor was perfect. I suspect it was the secret ingredient of salt that helped them escape one-dimensional sweetness. As I noted, the cake was almost white, not yellow – and ideally I’d have preferred something sturdier (more along the lines of the Magnolia’s). In this instance, though, it worked well, playing off the dense frosting nicely.

That’s not to say that Magnolia didn’t have potential – if you tossed a bit of salt into the batter and the frosting, they’d have something truly magical on their hands.

But it just illustrates the fact that someone who does something first doesn’t necessarily do it best.

And so there you have it. Cupcakes, eaten in the name of science. Of course, for these results to have any scientific merit whatsoever, I should probably try and replicate my results over and over and … well, you know where this is headed:

-

It’s the same direction I’ve been going in for the last 30 years.