Joined by friends, I strolled into the new Magnolia on Third Street in Los Angeles and ordered one chocolate, one vanilla and one red velvet cupcake. Then down the street to Kiss My Bundt where we harassed Kiss My Bundt’s owner, Chrysta Wilson, into sitting down with us us for a little head-to-head competition.

What you may not suspect about me is that cake is my biggest weakness. Being a food professional who takes every opportunity to taste the most interesting and exotic flavors in the world, you would think that I would be “above” the common cake. But no. I am an absolute cake whore, sampling the supposed “best of” wherever I go. And so I consider myself extremely qualified to compare the caketastic pride of LA and NYC despite my personal involvement with Kiss My Bundt. (After having discovered Chrysta Wilson’s little pink and brown bakery, I published her first cookbook, Kiss My Bundt recipes from the award-winning bakery.)

Brandishing plastic forks, we attacked the tasting from delicate flavors to the more rich, so red velvet was first. Now, Kiss My Bundt’s red velvet is a point of pride for Chrysta. The cake, which has been featured in several LA publications, is a recipe that truly speaks of Wilson’s Southern heritage. So it was no surprise to me that Chrysta’s was the superior cake.

As Chrysta says, red velvet should just “taste like cake.” In other words, it shouldn’t seem heavy or chocolaty or overly sour. The Magnolia cake was none of those things but nor was it particularly cake-y. In fact, it tasted of nothing but sweet. The frosting on the Magnolia was lovely. It was a light and fluffy vanilla frosting, (I’m guessing it had a touch of egg white but not as much as you would find in Italian buttercream). However, atop a cake that lacked depth of flavor it just didn’t quite work. (I tried spreading a little bit of it on both the Magnolia and KMB vanilla cakes and found this to be a much more compelling match.) One plus with regards to both cakes is that neither had that almost metallic flavor of red dye. When a bakery over-uses dye to get a vibrant red color it compromises flavor but both of these cakes showed restraint.

The vanilla cakes were a bit of a better match-up. I remembered Magnolia as making a delicious vanilla cupcake, although I hadn’t had it in about 3 years. This time, I was disappointed in the crumbly texture. I could swear last time the cake was much more moist. But the flavor was excellent. KMB’s vanilla was a more dense and substantial cake with far less frosting (my preference). The Magnolia buttercream is thick and sweet and it reminded me of a child’s birthday party. KBM’s is more fluffy, which, although I realize is just a matter of personal preference, was the superior topping in my estimation.

Last came the chocolates. I am sad to report that the Magnolia was a grave disappointment. I could tell by the color that it lacked the richness of high-fat cocoa powder that makes KMB’s chocolate cake so addictive. The cake, once again, was crumbly. It also lacked chocolaty richness. If you love super-gooey frosting, that would be the cake’s one saving grace. But I like to taste chocolate in my chocolate cake, not frosting. Although we took the leftover cakes home for later, the Magnolia chocolate never found its way to anyone’s mouth. Instead, it went straight from box to garbage bin.

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

In order to taste 16 cupcakes (17 really, because we added Chrysta’s cookies and cream bundt to the mix), we had to have a game plan. Chrysta suggested starting with the lighter flavors and moving into chocolate. She began with strawberry. Here’s where I have to confess my hatred for one kind of cake. Can’t stand strawberry, the flavor my brother always insisted upon for his birthdays. Grrr.

So I reached for orange. The two contenders were Sprinkles orange with orange buttercream and the one from Frosted. Frosted’s orange was the most highly decorated of their cakes. Sitting on my plate, its decadence offered an almost comical appearance. The cake was coated in white chocolate curls, so heavily decorated its shape was like that of a ball on a stand. In fact, it almost resembled the head of a poodle, dyed a strange shade of orange. The cake was indiscribibly sweet, the frosting even sweeter. The product was good, moist, attractive with bright, tart flavor but was so sweet I couldn’t touch more than one tiny bite.

Sprinkles orange was next. First, the cake: It offered the freshness of zested oranges and a reasonable texture. The frosting, although far too heavily spread, was a traditional buttercream, subtly flavored orange. The result was sweet but almost refreshing. It was the best Sprinkles cake I’ve ever tried.

The vanilla cakes were both a disappointment. The Frosted was the prettiest cake of the bunch with its vanilla swirl of frosting and white-sprinkled edging. But the cake was so sweet you really couldn’t taste vanilla and the frosting was that dense, sticky sort of buttercream that’s more powdered sugary than buttery. The Famous was strange. The bakery’s signature cake, the vanilla is spiced and tastes more of cinnamon than of the bean for which it is named. The milk chocolate frosting on top was absolutely lovely although it didn’t integrate well with the cupcake’s spicy flavor.

Next I tried red velvet, the cake flavor of the moment in Los Angeles. First there was Sprinkles. The cake is somehow simultaneously dry and oily. The frosting was thick and chewy, neither an attribute I want in my frosting. Frosted was an improvement. The texture was nice but the cake was more sweet than sour – a flavor note a true red velvet should offer. The Famous was extremely chocolatey. Its color so dark it was barely red. There was a nice balance of cake to frosting but again it lacked that faint sourness which makes red velvet so unique.

On to the chocolates, we dove in to the variations on cookies and cream. Each was an Oreo frosting atop chocolate cake. The frosted tasted like cookies and cream ice cream with little chunks of chocolate wafer cookie, tasty but so sweet when paired with the light chocolate flavor of the cake. The Famous offered a far more rich and bitter chocolate cake, deliciously dark like a bar of fine, dark chocolate. The frosting, however, basically tasted like the filling of the oreo. lacking the flavor of the dark cookie wafer. Although they were among the tastiest cakes in the tasting, I still prefer the Kiss My Bundt cookies and cream cake to either of these.

In the home stretch we tasted the two peanut butter cakes. The Sprinkles, tasted first, was the peanut butter chip, a peanut butter cake with chocolate chips, topped with peanut butter frosting and a dense layer of dark chocolate sprinkles. My first fork full was pure frosting which almost made me gag with surprise by the overwhelming sweetness and density. This isn’t frosting, its thinned-out peanut butter fudge. Its fantastic if you’re looking for peanut butter fudge but it is not appropriate, in my opinion, as a topping on a cake. The cake itself was dense and heavy, oily with peanut butter and so wet you could almost squeeze out the oil. On the bright side, the bakery uses high-quality sprinkles on top! The pb from Famous was a milk chocolate and peanut butter cake topped with a light, mildly peanut buttery buttercream. Teetering on the brink of too sweet, there was just enough restraint to make the cake deliciously decadent, moist, with complexity of flavors – although I could only eat half in a sitting.

Lastly, we tasted the Famous black tie, a super-rich dark chocolate with a dark chocolate buttercream. The frosting was so dark and chocolately it was a reddish black color – something I’ve never seen before atop a cake. Its flavors were equally intense, interesting and delicious. We definitely saved the best for last! Chrysta and I both agreed that it was hands-down the best cake of the day. The cake itself was dense and moist and with a faintly bitter finish and probably the most intense dark chocolate flavor I’ve ever tasted in a cake. It was sophisticated, sexy and satisfying, the perfect climax to an orgy of sweets.

famous black tie and peanut butter