Cupcakes, As Promised

[mark_asphodel]

So.  Cupcakes.

Tiny.  Trendy.  All over the damn place.

Having turned up my nose repeatedly at the hottest cupcake joint in the Metro Detroit area because their cakes are simply not that good, I was feeling the lack of cupcake moderne action in my corner of Dearborn.   Westborn bakery sells, in addition to Just Baked's prepackaged offerings, some housemade cakes so piled with icing they look more like cones of frozen custard.  They're OK in a pinch, but not great.  Bartz Bakery and Monroe Bakery swing more to old-style cupcakes-- chocolate or yellow cakelets topped with whirls of sugared shortening.  The ones at Bartz are slightly better and more ambitious; I stick to other forms of baked goods at Monroe, like the oatmeal-date cookies.  

Then Iversen's, the stuffy-looking place on Outer Drive, opened an "express" location in my corner strip mall.  And they turn out to be the local cupcake paradise, selling small cakes with a moderate amount of icing and a different flavor line-up every day.  Last week I got a pistachio cupcake, and the green buttercream was the real deal.  Yesterday it was a little chocolate cake topped and filled with peanut-butter cream, so good the guy who owns the diner next door was chowing down on one when I dropped in.

I'm hooked.  Their website is so staid, and so aimed at wedding cakes, that I had no idea they were a cupcake place that also makes wonderful danishes and amazingly flavored bar cookies.  But the cakes have a good texture, the frosting levels are somewhat excessive but nowhere near the gloppy piles at Westborn, and-- crucially-- the flavor combos work.  I'm not eating them just because they're cupcakes and I'm bored; I'm actively enjoying them.

Still not the best cupcakes I've had ever, but a hell of a lot better than what I've been trying around the area.

Comments

[searains.livejournal.com]

I'm genuinely interested in cupcake elitism. Before now, I didn't know it existed. Please tell me more about trendy cupcakes and things like that.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Oh! Well, it started off in Los Angeles with a bakery called Sprinkles and a place in New York City called Crumbs, I think. I'm guessing this was 2006/2007? Anyway, Sex and the City featured some cupcake place called the Magnolia Bakery, and 2008 it was super-trendy. Also, the Food Network in the US had a show called Cupcake Wars, so that fueled the trend. Now it's so overblown that TV characters like the two dopes on Two Broke Girls have opening a cupcake shop as their ambition-- because, you know, of COURSE young women want to run a cupcake shop!

Anyway, the iconic cupcake of the boom is a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese frosting, and every shop has their own version. Savory cupcakes are also part of the trend-- I visited a shop named More in Chicago and had a maple-tinged bacon cupcake that was wonderful (a marriage of the cupcake boom to the bacon craze, no less). More had some really great things for sale when I went there in '08, but like any trend, a lot of what's on the market is awful.

For instance: Just Baked here in Michigan makes cupcakes flavored with locally-made Faygo pop. Nice idea. Horrible, horrible in reality-- the grape one particular was vile. You'll see peanut-butter banana combos, liquor-infused cupcakes for adults, chai latte cupcakes, and plain ol' fashioned chocolate and vanilla. But a lot of the crazy flavors mask the simple fact that the cakes are the usual bakery mush and the frosting is super-sweet icky glop-- fat plus sugar. And the cake to frosting ratio is usually nuts; some of these things are literally 1/3 to 1/2 frosting! And, of course, trendy = overpriced.

More Cupcakes is, as I said really, really good (or were three years ago)-- top-notch ingredients, inspired flavors. Haven't had anything fresh from Sprinkles, but the mixes they sell for home baking produced the best red velvet cakes I've ever had. But the hit-to-miss ratio at any random cupcake shop is pretty high, and a lot of them are just a waste of money and calories.

Here's an article from 2009 that covers the first half(?) of the boom:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2009/09/the_cupcake_bubble.html

[searains.livejournal.com]

I had been previously exposed to mirco-bubbles but it didn't even pass through my mind that it affected such a wide range of products. It seems really interesting that this serves as such a concrete model for larger bubbles. Do you think that the majority of the people realize what they're eating (in the instance of bad cupcakes) and have succumbed to cupcake elitism such as yourself, or do they not care so much?

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Do you think that the majority of the people realize what they're eating (in the instance of bad cupcakes) and have succumbed to cupcake elitism such as yourself, or do they not care so much?

No clue. I know people who claim to honestly love Just Baked, but I also know people who think supermarket cakes topped with whipped Crisco are pretty good, so there's no accounting for tastes. But there are, IMO, cupcake joints worth the effort to find, just as there are steakhouses or coffeehouses or Nepalese restaurants worth the effort to find, and there are places that are pretty much cashing in on the bubble because it's there and they're making a profit. Which is fine, but I'm not going to wait in line for something I don't want to eat just because it comes in a cute box. Just like I don't go to Starbucks because I simply do not like their coffee.

One of my co-workers just brought in pumpkin spice cupcakes with a thin layer of cream cheese icing. She made them herself. They were wonderful.

[myaru.livejournal.com]

Maybe Fremont isn't the happening place for cupcake shops, because I can't find any. :/ (Not that this is indicative of the actual situation. I leave the house appallingly infrequently these days.) The only one I know of is in SF Japantown, and they had some neat flavors when I dropped by - the strawberry cheesecake cupcake was interesting, and I think the flavors combined well to give the right impression, though I wouldn't say it met the standard of its namesake. The meyer lemon cupcake was awesome, but lemon cupcakes aren't hard to come by.

This blog (http://cupcakeblog.com/) makes me want to try to make my own. I don't know about all of her flavor combos, but some of them do sound good.

Commercial baked goods have made me loathe icing. That's why I was so shocked to learn that homemade buttercream frosting is actually pretty good as long as you don't overdo it.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

I'd expect there to be a fair number of these joints in the Bay Area. Sure 'nuff...

http://www.cupcakesonthego.net/ (Blacow Rd, they deliver)
http://www.yelp.com/biz/es-cupcakes-fremont-2 (Stevenson Blvd, apparently based out of someone's home)

homemade buttercream frosting is actually pretty good as long as you don't overdo it.

I love buttercream when I make it myself. I hate a lot of what is sold as buttercream, whether it's the Safeway Special kind of Crisco icing or the textureless buttercream at the French bakery I worked at when I first moved to MI.

Thanks for the blog link!