on a secret cupcake mission
The day after my day of eating LA with Chef Annette, I met up with Chrysta Wilson, author of Kiss My Bundt and baker extraordinaire for a cupcake reconnaissance mission. As the owner of Kiss My Bundt bakery, Chrysta has to keep up with what the other sweets bakeries around Los Angeles (and around the country) are doing – from cake quality to pricing, sizing, flavors, marketing and presentation. I was going along simply to satisfy my sugar addition. (Bear in mind that as a publishing executive, I fell so far in love with Chrysta’s cake that I had to publish her book!) I also helped provide a diversion. Even though every baker should visit the competition, the simple fact of a woman like Chrysta walking through the door of a competitor’s shop can result in some nasty twitter backlash.
She mapped out three spots for our investigation and picked up half a dozen assorted confections from Frosted Cupcakery in Hollywood before we met up. Together, we traveled to Beverly Hills to scope out two of the four or five bakeries located within a mile or two of her popular storefront on Third Street – a heavily trafficked shopping street just east of Beverly Hills on Los Angeles’ West Side.
First we visited Famous Cupcakes. A bakery that launched in the San Fernando Valley, Famous is now popular enough to support a second location in one of LA’s toniest districts. Two things stood out about the bakery. The first, as Chrysta pointed out, was that everyone working in the shop was male. It isn’t an equal opportunity slam… Think about it. Who do you picture behind the counter when you see yourself in a bakery. Typically, it’s a woman. But not a glimpse of the fairer sex was to be found at Famous! The other thing that stood out was the huge poster on the wall presenting the bakery’s new advertising campaign. The poster was a portrait of Kim, Khloe, Kourtney and Kris Kardashian with a chicken scratch scrawl declaring their love for their favorite cupcakery. Ok. I… Even hours later I am at a loss for words.
Besides the fact that I’m unclear as to when the Kardashians became culinary experts, isn’t Kim Kardashian the spokesperson for an over-the-counter diet supplement (not to mention the creator of an exercise DVD)? Perhaps the secret to her famous-for-being-famous derrier is red velvet? Honestly, if it were just the poster, or even the Kim Kardashian cupcake baking mix – yep, you can buy your box online at http://www.famouscupcakes.com/html/kim_kardashian_s_vanilla_cupca.html, I could let it go as a slightly misguided but not unreasonable addition to the bakery’s “famous” angle. But they’ve so overused the Kardashian connection that the ladies appear in high gloss splendor all over the bakery’s custom packaging.
As we left the bakery, I looked down at our boxes, (we ordered another half dozen including vanilla with milk chocolate frosting, peanut butter chocolate, red velvet, strawberry, oreo and something called black tie), and all I could think was that we looked like we were carrying a the box of some Fischer Price toy we just bought at Walmart, not artisan baked goods. (See photo of the box below.) To me, it s a cruel treatment for box of joyous treats!
Next we swung by Sprinkles, possibly the most famous cupcakery in America after Manhattan’s Magnolia. Sprinkles, always a busy spot, was at the beginning of the lunch rush. Behind the counter was an army of thin, young women, (yes, everyone we saw working at Sprinkles was female). We selected 4 cupcakes (orange, red velvet, peanut butter and strawberry). We were both familiar with Sprinkles product but wanted to have some items to compare directly with the cakes from the other two bakeries.
We returned to Chrysta’s shop and proceeded to unpack all 16 of our purchases. The cupcakes from Frosted easily won the award for most charming. They were beautiful little jewels, (orange, strawberry, red velvet, vanilla with vanilla frosting, chocolate and cookies and cream), each topped with a frosting swirl and an embellishment appropriate to the cupcake’s flavor. They would be the wow of any child’s party and certainly looked like the cupcakes of my childhood dreams.
As we lined them up side-by-side, we noticed that the cakes varied wildly in size. Those from Famous were the largest by far but the mass was primarily cake, the topping of frosting was delightfully restrained, the mark of a quality baked good. (Great cake need not be hidden under sweet, buttery spackle.) We pulled out the kitchen scale to double check our powers of observation. Famous were almost an ounce bigger than those from Frosted. Sprinkles, (a bakery appropriately named because its focus is clearly on the toppings rather than the cake), actually offered the least cake but measured in as a heavyweight – frosting is far heavier than airy cupcake. (We pushed back the frosting to see that it made up about 1/3 of the total mass.) Chrysta’s mini bundt – which we also checked – weighed in right in the middle of the bunch, but, like Famous, offered a high proportion of cake to frosting.
Click Here for the Cupcake Tasting Notes
the offending famous cupcake box
[...] I returned to her shop from a Beverly Hills cupcake reconaissence mission, (see my previous post on a secret cupcake mission), we lined up our booty (16 cakes from 3 bakeries) like an army of sweet soldiers awaiting [...]
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