What’s With Cupcakes?
Sep 13, 2007 restaurants
I’m a slave to coffee, so when we went to New York last year, proving my obsession, I mapped out about 15 shops that I considered musts of a successful vacation. Any place we’d go, I’d turn to my trusty maps to see what shop was near. Ellie was not pleased with these maps by the end of the trip.
The Cupcake Café was one we’d really liked. It was a super cool shabby sheik sort of place; exactly what you’d expect to find in New York and it made the cut because they use Intelligentsia Black Cat Espresso.
It doesn’t take a sleuth to know that what they also had was cupcakes; the selection of which was truly magnificent. They were the best cupcakes I’d ever had. They took cupcakes to places no cupcake had ever dreamed of going before. I had the walnut cupcake with maple buttercream, and it wasn’t until that moment I’d ever understood why all those French people like buttercream so much.
Once back in St. Louis, we were greeted with a cupcake shop, The Cupcakery, which was so quickly followed by Jilly’s Cupcake Bar it seemed as if cupcakes would be the next balsamic vinegar or pomegranate. One of my friends just convinced his wife to move back to St. Louis from Boston. Her final sway; she would move for Jilly’s cupcakes.
So wow, apparently, Benito’s Gelato will also begin selling cupcakes according to this article about businesses rolling with the punches, and turning to plan B when things aren’t going as planned.
I haven’t been to any of these places, but I can only hope the buttercream in St. Louis is better now then it was in the past. As I found out in NYC, when it’s good, it’s wonderful, but when it’s bad, it’s like eating a bowl of whipped sugar and butter.
Tags: cupcakes
September 13th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I love cupcakes, so I’m perfectly fine with this new fad.
September 14th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Of the four gelato places I’ve tried in St. Louis, I like Benito’s the best. Their blood orange is terrific, it’s one of the few things I always order every time I go to a place.
September 17th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Benito’s has in fact begun selling cupcakes. I was in their Chesterfield store a little more than a week ago and saw six rather dried-up cupcakes looking nearly as pathetic as pound puppies treading the line between adoption by a decrepit shut-in or the big sleep. In other words, it’s going to take a bit more thoughtful/aggressive marketing to make Benito’s a player in the nascent St. Louis cupcake arena. I was certainly not enticed to partake of one of their decaying cakelets and, most alarmingly, neither was my five year-old daughter at whose eye level the offerings were being displayed.
The gelato, on the other hand, was sublime.
September 17th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Hey Bill,
Kimberly from Slow Food here. Cupcakes are all the rage for weddings these days too. My friend Stef graciously volunteered to bake a “cupcake tower” for a set of mutual friends and she’s blogging away about it. Check out:
http://cupcakeproject.blogspot.com/
It’s so interesting!