I went to Colorado for a week this past summer. I started in Denver to see the city, went over to Estes Park to see the mountains, and then drove to Vail to appease a childhood dream. I saw a silly movie a long time ago called Aspen Extreme about ski instructors, and Aspen and Vail became the magical province of the wealthy in my mind. Since Vail is only a 2-3 hour drive from Denver, I decided I just had to see the town. I splurged on the Sonnenalp, a Swiss, luxury hotel that had amazing rates in the ‘off season’.

It was the most amazing hotel experience I’ve had, and I’ve done a fair bit of traveling. The hotel had a lot of western antiques all over the place, like wooden farm implements and ancient telephones, and the rooms had cathedral ceilings above the bed, unfinished wood furniture, and stucco walls. My balcony opened out onto the courtyard, and my bathroom had double sinks. When I returned to my room after evening turndown, I found a chocolate chip cookie, carafe of water, a robe, and a pair of slippers set out for me.

Andy likes the evening turndown, too

I had opted to include a buffet breakfast at Ludwig’s with my room, and it matched the room in its luxury experience. First, the hostess and staff greeted me by name several times downstairs. I ate on a glass-covered veranda with the buffet a room away. When I walked in, I noticed the cereal bar straight off.

Cereal bar at Ludwig's in the Sonnenalp

This isn’t the most fantastic shot, but realize that each of those bowls on the top held a cereal topping: dark quinoa, white quinoa, flax, almonds, cashews, dried bananas, dried apricots, dried cranberries, raisins, coconut, and sunflower seeds. The cereal included frosted flakes, granola, bran flakes, fruit loops, and cornflakes.

I made this beauty. The fresh fruit came from the yogurt bar, right next to the cereal bar, which had plain yogurt, flavored yogurt, kiwi, strawberries, bananas, granola, and other delicious toppings. It was heaven.

Oh, cereal, I wish I had you now

Quinoa and cranberries

The cranberry is so jewel-like in that photo.

As I circled the room, I started to panic. It all looked delicious. There were hot foods, like scrambled eggs, potatoes, and bacon. There were pastries, muffins, and bagels. There was a waffle press. They even had cheese blintzes! They were yummy. The blueberry muffin was the bluest one I’ve ever had. Now, when I showed this muffin to my Facebook fans, half of them thought it looked disgusting, moldly, and too blue. I thought it was pretty, but I love blue anything.

Blueberry muffin at the Sonnenalp

Superblue blueberry muffin

So, after cereal, a muffin, eggs, and a blintz.. I went for more. I know. I know. But it was all so pretty! The apple pastry was just so-so, but isn’t that premade parfait cute? It was fresh strawberry jam, topped with yogurt, then some granola and a strawberry. They had similar shot glasses of sparkling grapefruit. Those were so beautiful but I didn’t want to be greedy.

Yogurt parfait and apple danish

I paid the bill. Except I didn’t, because it was part of my room. I just left a tip. Pretty sweet! The drink menu reminds me that the coffee came in a very large cup with a saucer, the kind you see tea served in at a coffee house. I think you could fit a softball in there. The reason I bring it up is because the china had a lovely pattern on it, and definitely seemed like high-quality porcelain. I felt like I was in The Sound of Music when drinking out of it.

Paying the bill

So, if you are wondering whether to stay at the Sonnenalp — yes, in the summer, definitely do it. If you’re wondering whether to add the breakfast to your room – yes, definitely do it! You won’t have omelets to order, but the food is very tasteful, tasty, and varied, with high-quality ingredients, a lovely presentation, and superior service.

After nibbling on two appetizers, eating a salad, having a tiny pumpkin muffin, and sampling elk, bison, and quail, I still had some room – or so I told myself. Look, it was time for dessert, and that’s my favorite part of any meal. Because I knew I would be taking pictures, I even went ahead and ordered two. Yes, I was one woman, of a normal weight, ordering two desserts, because I felt like it. It was awesome.

Getting two desserts solved the dilemma I’ve mentioned many times on this blog: I love cake, and I want to order cake, but I don’t always like the cake. So, what did I do? I ordered the cake, and I ordered the panna cotta, which sounded really weird and therefore extremely exciting.

Mexican chocolate cake

The Fort’s chocolate cake is a Mexican cake with a little chile spice in the mix. I’ve had chocolate with cayenne and chipotle before, and I quite liked it. This particular cake also had bourbon somewhere in it, but I am not sure where. I could definitely taste the tingle of the chile as I ate it, though. Boy, this was a generous serving – I think those two pieces were a quarter of an 8 inch cake.I managed a few bites and that was it – I was pretty full, and there wasn’t enough vavavoom to this dessert to inspire me.

Rosemary-infused panna cotta

I mentioned a panna cotta, which is basically cream and sugar that is set with gelatin. This variation was rosemary infused with huckleberries on top. I’ve never had panna cotta or huckleberries before. I’ve been missing out my entire life. I love smooth, creamy flavors, and panna cotta is so, so silkily textured. It was heaven in my mouth. The rosemary gave it a bright, lemony, herbal note in the background that was just wonderful. Of course, the berries were very welcome as well – tart and brightly colored, mixing with the mildly-flavored cream in lovely streaks.

Empty panna cotta glass

I found room for the panna cotta and in fact ate the whole thing. Do you see the patterns on the side? That’s where I was desperately scraping with my spoon.

Coffee with Frangelico

I mentioned in a previous post that I had an ulterior motive regarding the sunset. Well, it was about 8:30 and the sun’s official setting time was 8:52 on this glorious July day, so I decided to order a coffee to extend my stay a little. I am a sucker for coffees with liqueur because they somehow transform normal coffee into something magical topped with whipped cream. This one had Frangelico and maybe Kahlua in it. It was actually very good; I could taste the alcohol but in a very pleasant way. It definitely added to the flavor of the coffee itself, which wasn’t too robust.

The whipped cream was fantastic, of course. I wanted to take that axe stirrer with me, but it said The Fort on it like it was custom-made for them, so I thought it’d be wrong to take it. The coffee was a nice end to a very nice meal. Afterwards, I went to the patio to watch the moon rise and caught the sunset behind me, as documented in the last post. Success!

Continuing my posts about the Fort, a historic restaurant in the hills outside of Denver, we arrive at my entree, the Game Plate. It was a bison filet, an elk steak, and a teriyaki quail. I was on a quest to eat things that I would not be able to easily find in New Jersey or New York, you see. I also love good steak but never order it out for dieting reasons. Since I was on vacation, I was splurging all over the place.

Please forgive the slightly lower quality; I was seated a few feet from a window in a dark building, and the sun was going down. Out of courtesy, I never use flash in a restaurant. These low-light photos were taken with my wonderful Mark II 50mm Canon lens that is amazingly only $90.

The elk chop is the larger cut on top. It was great! This was the most meat I’ve eaten in one sitting in literally years, period, because even when we eat it at home, I limit myself to 5 oz. The flavor and texture were wonderful. Sometimes gamey meat has a bad connotation to it but there was nothing ‘off’ or ‘rancid’ or ‘vegetal’ about the flavor that I recall.

Steaks at the Fort

That bird sticking out is a quail in teriyaki sauce. It’s a wee bird for sure. I never eat non-breast chicken so this, too, was an unusual feat for me, and I wasn’t quite sure how to eat it, so I tore it apart with my fork. I think that’s a good sign, as it was very tender, but this property might have do with how small a quail is. There was never more than an inch thickness of meat at any given point. The teriyaki sauce was good but I imagined it overshadowed any unique flavors of the quail. However, I thought this was tasty, and I’d eat it again.

The photo makes me laugh because it’s like the quail is the wicked witch in the wizard of oz. An elk steak fell on it instead of a house.

Quail and Elk steak in the Fort's Game Plate

I love rare meat, as it has more flavor and juiciness to me. I prefer the meltingly soft texture of a rare cut to the stringy texture of something well-done. The bison was, as you can see, quite rare, and I was pretty pleased. It’s also a lean meat – bison is low fat and in fact does not have the same ‘marbled’ property as beef at all.

Piece of bison steak

So there I was, a young woman in a dress, sitting alone, eating two appetizers, a salad, and a plate of game, to be followed by two desserts, most of which I didn’t eat. This young woman also had a camera and a bag of lenses.

Now, it’s not unusual, in the Tristate area (NJ, PA, NY), to have a manager come over to your table once in awhile and ask how you are. I have been asked that many times when I did not have a camera on me. When my waiter and then a manager asked me how my meal was, I thought that was normal.

Then the owner came over.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I was researching restaurants with a view for my Denver trip, I read about The Fort in Morrison, Colorado. I was lucky to have stumbled upon this list because I hadn’t been looking at places in Boulder, Morrison, Aurora, and other surrounding towns. The Fort is in the foothills of the Rockies, a few miles from Red Rock Amphitheatre. It has its own slab of red rock, and it’s built entirely out of adobe mud to look like a trading post that stood on the same site in 1846.

The Fort has decided to live up to its rich history by serving game that is local to Colorado. As soon as I saw elk, rattlesnake, quail, buffalo, and other meats on the menu, I was sold. I got there at 6:00 and hoped to park at a Denver-facing window until sunset.

To start, I had a mint julep in a mason jar. I’ve never had one, but the Great Gatsby made them sound awesome, so I gave it a try. It had French brandy, peach brandy, and some mint. I’m not much of a drinker so it was a little strong for me, but I felt pretty cool drinking from a jar, having never done that before.

Old-fashioned mint julep in a mason jar

They didn’t have rattlesnake on the menu that day, which I found deeply disappointing. I replaced it with beef tongue, which sounded strange and therefore interesting. It was extremely soft and tender; it literally melted in your mouth. When you took a bite out of it on the toast, it just pulled apart. However, it was all texture; because it was sliced so thin, it didn’t have a lot of beefy flavor. I don’t know what I expected. All I know about beef tongue is a scene in a Ramona/Judy Bloom book.

I am pleased with this picture because I was seated a few feet from the window and already starting to have lighting problems because of the setting sun. A good sharpening in my graphics program helped out a lot.

Beef tongue from The Fort

The other appetizer I had planned for was indeed available that evening: Rocky Mountain Oysters. For those unacquainted, they are beef testicles. This preparation breaded and fried them, which I am told is common. I actually never eat fried things if I can help it, both for health reasons and a deep loathing for getting grease on my hands or face. This means no fried chicken, chicken nuggets, deep fried turkey/poptarts/twinkies, etc. I do eat French fries and the occasional mozzarella stick, though, so I gave these a try.

Fried Rocky Mountain Oysters

This is the inside of one. It’s pale, right? Like dark meat chicken? That’s what it tasted like. (Ironic, right?) It didn’t taste like beef — just meat and iron. I ate a few with the provided salsa but I didn’t care for them. It was like eating chicken nuggets. I hoped for something more revolutionary. I mean, it’s a testicle!  I should note, too, that both of these appetizers were half portions because I was eating by myself.

Rocky Mountain Oysters

I followed that with a jicama and pumpkin seed salad with a damiana vinaigrette. Damiana is an herb native to Mexico, and it smelled extremely familiar when I was eating it. I later found out it is used in teas and some people liken it to chamomile which might explain it. It was a nice dressing — the herbal notes really upped the vegetation factor of the salad. I want to eat a salad to eat plants, not chicken, cheese, tortilla strips, or wontons, and the damiana vinaigrette really cements that experience.

This is my favorite salad photo ever. I like the white light in the background, the shape of the bowl, the luminescence of the leaves, and the overall framing of the shot. I can see why a lot of food photographers style with light behind the subject, though I think it gets boring after awhile.

Salad

My meal at Osteria Marco covered a lot of bases. I started with burrata, an Italian cheese, then went on to seafood. The dish below is Frutti di Mare or Fruit of the Sea, which is a fitting name because it includes crab, shrimp, calamari, and lobster. All in one dish! It was served cold, with a binding of an aioli (kind of like mayonnaise) and chickpea paste. The red spots are a lobster-and-red-pepper oil.

Frutti de Mare at Osteria Marco

The onions and celery made this almost like a seafood-salad experience, but one that had whole calamari and little tentacles in it. Because it was cold, it reminded me a bit of ceviche, but it wasn’t nearly as acidic as that dish is. The flavor here was mostly in the chickpea binding, because it was hard to distinguish the individual flavors of each specific type of seafood. It was definitely fresh, but not remarkable to me. I didn’t feel like I was eating lobster, or crab, or calamari.

Seafood on a fork

To follow up my seafood, I had.. pizza. It’s an unusual choice to be sure, but this restaurant is famous for their gourmet pizza selection, so I dove in. I wanted to eat something truly unusual, and though I was originally thinking of the Carbonara, which is a pizza with pancetta and egg on it, I ended up with the fig and prosciutto pizza. I like figs, and it seemed vaguely healthy with some fruit on it. (Look, honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking.)

When I look at this picture, I see a normal pizza with cherry tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, and maybe sausage or mushrooms. However, those ‘tomatoes’ are actually figs, that cheese is goat cheese and fontina, the brown lumps are caramelized onions, and the shavings are prosciuttio, or pork. Regardless of the ingredients, this is my favorite photo of this set and probably my best pizza photo to date.

Fig and Prosciutto Pizza at Osteria Marco

After eating a whole puck of burrata and a similarly sized serving of the frutti di mare, I was a little too full. The sweetness of the fig was just not the right pairing for those things, either. I didn’t want sweet after the rich, clean taste of cheese, then the briny taste of seafood. I wanted earthy, savory, salty pizza. I should have gotten a sausage pie, basically. Well, I learned a lesson that day – I don’t like sweet pizza.

A slice of gourmet pizza

You may have noticed the above picture seems to have a bite taken out of the crust. I assure you that I did not eat my pizza on the wrong-end, then hastily take a picture of it. Here’s that extra piece of crust on the pie plate. I would like this picture so much more without it; if the white plate was cleaner, this would be a great photo.

See, didn't take a bite out of that slice

Chocolate Nutella Cake at Osteria Marco

I said I was too full to enjoy the pizza, and indeed, I ate about two mini slices and picked at a third. However, nothing would keep me from trying out dessert, so I plowed ahead and ordered this chocolate cake. It’s a hazelnut torte with nutella syrup on the edges and vanilla gelato. I hoped the nutella would make it interesting, or that the hazelnut, a flavor I love, would shine through, but it was your standard dense chocolate cake. The gelato was unremarkable. I left most of this dessert on the plate.

In its defense, I don’t like chocolate cake. I like cake as a general rule, so if I see cake, I’ll order it, but over and over again, I have found that chocolate cake just doesn’t do it for me. It overwhelms all other flavors, it is often dry, and its often served icing- and filling-free. I need to just accept this and stop ordering it but the rest of the menu is often no better. I always want dessert, but never what’s on the menu. Sigh.

Back to the photography, I do like the picture, but wish I had paid more attention to the edge of the table in the upper left corner. I’m pleased with this from a personal perspective, because the light was fading fast when I took this shot, and subsequent photos were blurry, so I am glad this one came through.

Osteria Marco is another restaurant in Denver’s Larimer Square. They focus on casual Italian food, which really means gourmet pizza. The owner has several other restaurants with more upscale tastes, so this one was meant to have a more convivial atmosphere to go with the high-quality food. I don’t know if they really managed that. Denver as a whole is a lot more casual than what I am used to in NYC, and everyone in Larimer was nicely dressed anyway. Yes, people were gabbing and laughing, but I think they would have done so at any other restaurant on the block.

I ordered the burrata as my appetizer. Burrata is a thin skin of mozzarella, filled with a soft mixture of mozzarella and cream. It was invented in Italy partially to get rid of leftover mozzarella. I’ve had it just once before from Whole Foods in NYC. It was freshly made but sat on my desk at work for a few hours, unrefrigerated, and when I got home and tried it, it was creamy but had an underlying bitterness. The cheese is supposed to keep for 24 hours so I wasn’t sure if that was just part of its flavor profile. Osteria Marco’s burrata is made in-house so it was guaranteed to be as fresh as can be.

I really love the wooden slats in this photo; it really changes the tone of the photograph. As you can see, they served the cheese with olive oil and toasted, rustic bread.

Burrata at Osteria Marco

The cheese was topped with pepper, which I adore, and some olive oil. Freshly ground pepper has the most intoxicating smell. I grew up smelling table pepper and, as a result, never added it to anything, but once I got a whiff of toasted peppercorns from a grinder, I was sold.

Burrata with olive oil and pepper

The char on this bread is simply gorgeous. The whole thing has such a delightfully rustic look; the flour dusted on its side, the wide-open crumb, the thick slices. This is the way to serve bread at an Italian place! I don’t even like bread that much.

Rustic bread

I mentioned above that the burrata I had a few months ago was slightly bitter. I braced myself when trying Osteria’s, but it was perfect. Creamy, delightful, clean-tasting. Not a trace of unpleasantness in it. It was much like eating a fresh ricotta or cottage cheese, but with a smoother texture. I’m a sucker for soft, creamy mouthfeels, which is why I love melted cheese, melted icecream, and frosting. This cheese put me in eyes-closed, fully-concentrating-on-this-wonderful-flavor mode, which happens rarely. The only cheese that has done that for me consistently is, curiously, the mozzarella sticks at Johnny Carino’s. (I know that’s lame because it is a chain. The combo of breading, cheese, and that perfect spicy marinara sauce is what gets me, rather than the cheese itself.) I’ve had cheese at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s restaurant, that didn’t speak to me this much.

Burrata on a fork

I love the idea of the burrata on the bread because this bread was just so beautiful, but the hard crunch of the toasted edges paired with the creaminess of the cheese didn’t work for me. I loved this cheese for its texture, and I didn’t want anything obscuring that.

Burrata on toasted bread

Rioja is one of many small, hip restaurants in Denver’s historic Larimer Square area. It’s well-reviewed, so I thought I’d eat there, and when I looked at the menu, the homemade donuts definitely sold me on brunch. It’s supposedly Mediterranean food, but I did not get that vibe from the brunch menu. It had some pasta but also some curry and other Indian influences, as well as tuna nicoise, and, well, waffles. This isn’t a bad thing – it’s simply not your typical Italian place.

I knew I’d be taking pictures so I sat outside in the direct sunlight, right around the hottest part of the day. It was somewhere between 90-100 degrees in Denver. My iPhone was soon coffee-cup hot, I was occasionally touching my water glass to my face, and you can see what happened to my butter. For the record, the bread they gave me with it — one lavender-flavored, one studded with olives — was pretty nice.

Butter in the summer in Denver

The donuts. Oh, the donuts. Freshly made donuts, made by anyone, are delicious. They’re hot, doughy, and comforting. These donuts were filled with lemon curd and mascarpone, the creamy cheese they use in tiramisu. I’m a sucker for lemon curd, and the combination here was excellent; decadent, creamy, velvety texture, cutting down the acidity of the lemon so you get a bright, but gentle taste of melt-in-your-mouth goodness.

Homemade donuts from Rioja

Did I mention the melt-in-your-mouth goodness? Because these donuts were hot from the oven, the filling was a delightful stream of yellow that I loved to mop up with the donut. The one downside was that eating these were messy. I had that powdered sugar all over my fingers and mouth. It was a fun, whimsical messy, though. It was the mess of eating something truly enjoyable.

I experimented with adding a fork to my photos to style them a little better. One can’t rely on macro shots alone, right?

Homemade donut with melty lemon filling

They also kindly provided some blueberry compote for you to add to your donut. I tried spooning some into the donut, dipping the donut into it, and then just eating it off the plate, mixed with the remnants of the lemon curd mascarpone. It’s an interesting choice because blueberries are tart like lemons are, and it balances out the pillowy decadence of the donut itself. I didn’t need the blueberries, personally, because the lemon flavor was enough for me, but I can see what they were going for. As an aside, I like this photo because it’s like it is a waterfall of blueberries, slowly spilling towards you.

Blueberry compote

Those were so delicious, I was pretty much full and finished, but I had my ‘entree’ coming out. Yes, those donuts were just ‘starters’. To get something both healthy and interesting-sounding, I selected a dungeness crab crepe, filled with asparagus, shiitake mushrooms, and crab, then topped with black truffle hollandaise sauce. Sounds fancy, but they look pretty normal, right? It’s the hollandaise – I realize it’s a cornerstone of French sauces, but it’s bright yellow. I just can’t take it seriously. I also didn’t taste the truffle flavor at all, and all in all, eating an egg-and-butter sauce after those donuts was just too much richness for me.

Asparagus, crab, and shiitake mushroom crepes

I ended up just eating the inside of the crepes, which were very light. The asparagus added some crunch to the soft crab, and the mushrooms brought some earthiness to shindig. They were generous with the amount of crab, and overall, I thought this was a good combination of flavors. I just wish I hadn’t had the donuts before it.

Asparagus, crab, and shiitake on a fork

As I mentioned in my last post, these photos are not as stellar as usual because I had to take these cupcakes on the bus, then wander around a hot, unfamiliar city to find some good light at 6 PM . Sorry! I learned a lot about what not to do next time I have to shoot in the street on vacation, at least.

So, here we go. My last cupcakes from Happy Cakes were a Cherry Coke cupcake and a Cosmo cupcake. The Cherry Coke cupcake is a cherry flavored icing on top of a chocolate and soda-flavored cupcake. This icing was pretty thick, close to a fondant, and pretty cherry-flavored. As always, I wasn’t getting a lot out of the soda cupcake. Cola just isn’t a strong-enough flavor to stand up to cake. Now, cherry frosting? Perfect. We need more of this. I’ll even venture to say we need it more than strawberry frosting.

The Cherry Coke is the pink cupcake in the foreground with the white sprinkles. I don’t have a better photo because it got flattened at the bottom of my cupcake bag. Boo.

Cherry coke cupcake

Now we move on to the Cosmo cupcake. The cupcake part of it was vodka-soaked and flavored with cranberry. I rarely taste the liquor in soaked cupcakes, and this was no exception, but the addition of cranberry packed a punch. It was very assertive, and I found that delightful because cupcakes tend to have good frosting but boring cakes. This was well-balanced.

Cosmo cupcake

If there’s one thing I can say about Happy Cakes, their frosting is flavorful. This cupcake had lime buttercream frosting that pretty much planted a flag on your tongue and said, “I’m here, and I’m staying.” Combined with the bold cranberry-flavored cake, it was pretty tart, but I liked that. It reminded me I was eating something, and this is important because, all too often, flavors get lost in the  mouthfeel of frosting. Raise your hands – how many of you have had frosting that tastes just like lard or just like butter? I thought so. (Heck, even my frosting tastes like butter, to my continued dismay.) Actually, this Cosmo was on the Martha Stewart show as one of her Favorites because she supposedly likes bold, tart flavors.

Cosmo cupcake frosting closeup

I like how the sugar encrusts the frosting, like tiny Pavé jewels. I think I’m seeing a trend where cupcakes that skew towards adults have sugar crystals instead of sprinkles. Sugar crystals are more elegant with their sparkle, whereas sprinkles, with their rounded shape and dull surfaces, are for kids. (Disclaimer: I get rainbow sprinkles on all my softserve icecream.)

Frosting peak

After my tour, I went back to Happy Cakes because I just knew that I had to have more of their cupcakes and take pictures for you all. Now, this posed an interesting problem. I had gotten to the Highlands by.. bus. So, picture me wandering around a somewhat run-down (but lovely), historic part of Denver, with two bags of cupcakes, altitude sickness (ie a splitting headache), 90+ degree weather, a large camera bag, and unfamiliar transportation. I briefly considered taking pictures on the sidewalk with some weeds in the background because it’d keep with the character of the area, but I thought I’d look even weirder than I already did.

This sets the stage for why 1) my cupcakes were smooshed and 2) why my light was unusual. You see, I got back to downtown Denver in the late afternoon. There was plenty of light.. in the sky. Unfortunately, it was blocked by all the high-rises. After wandering around, I found a spot of sunlight on the street caused by the sun reflecting off a skyscraper’s windows. It happened to be between some pillars on some bank. The end result? Me nestled into a dubious alcove photographing cupcakes on the street. I’m sure passerbys are still trying to figure out what they saw that day.

Back to the cake. When I saw Happy Cakes had hat was essentially cake on a stick, I had to try it. They put it in this cute little bag all by its lonesome, where I was certain it’d get crushed.

Happy Cakes bag

It’s cute, right? I love rainbow sprinkles.

Cake on a stick

The white coating is white chocolate. For those unfamiliar, cake pops are basically cake crumbles mixed with icing, chilled, then dipped into some hard coating that is usually chocolate. The stick is optional. Pioneer Woman has a nice post about them here, and Bakerella is a good source as well, with more cake pops than you could shake a stick at.

Cake pop from Happy Cakes

As always, I love the rogue pink sugar crystal in the middle. It’s like a stowaway. This is the kind of detail you never notice without photos.

Close up on the sprinkles

You may notice the innards of the cake pop look like cake. There’s no indication of icing. I will also say that I didn’t taste icing per se. It was moist but I guess the flavors meld together when you chill the cake. As a result, this was a nice little treat that wasn’t overly rich. It wasn’t streaked with pockets or veins of icing, though that’d be kind of fun. I enjoyed eating it but can’t remember anything remarkable about it. I really love cake, especially frosting, but I think I prefer them a little more separate so I can experience their flavors individually.

Innards of a cake pop

Unfortunately, my dude was a little top heavy and fell off the stick, so here he is, half-eaten with a crack in him. These are the downsides of taking photos in the street.  I’m fond of the lighting in this picture, though; that yellow hue on my hand is the setting sun of Colorado summer. It lends a nice warmth to the picture.

Cake pop after a little nibble

As I mentioned in a previous post, I went on a Culinary Connectors tour while in Denver and found myself at Happy Cakes, a well-known cupcake shop in the city. We spoke to the owner for awhile then took a look at their kitchen.

They have quite a few varieties for sale with rotating daily flavors. I like that they change up their frosting shapes – note the ribbon-like frosting in the back and on the left, compared to the thicker swirls of the Vanilla on Vanilla. Their different cupcake displays are also a nice touch.

Happy Cakes cupcake display

I get what they’re trying to do with the Black and White, but it looks a little strange.

Red velvet cupcake display

Now we went to the back. The Happy Cakes kitchen is tiny. It has a standing oven – think one of the tall, narrow cases where they keep the bread at Subway. That’s their only oven, for this whole establishment. They also have a sink, a lot of mix, a lot of frosting bags, and a shelf of liquor for flavors.

One of the owners talked to us a bit about owning a cupcake shop. She has kids and found the business to be very demanding on her time; she’s constantly on her blackberry and is not even doing the fun part, baking, much anymore. This was in contrast to the head chef at Trattoria Stella nearby, who worked 12 hour days with only a single half-day off each week. He didn’t seem to mind his situation – he said he loved food, and instead of having a girlfriend, he had the restaurant. The general message seemed to be owning your own business is time-consuming and hard, but moreso if you have a family.

These were the cupcakes they were working on to put on the displays in the front. In the front, the cupcakes are beautifully displayed and grouped together correctly, but those same cupcakes, jumbled together messily on a giant tray, look less magical, don’t they? It’s like lifting the veil of illusion about where food actually comes from.

Fresh-baked cupcakes

This was their delightful pen holder. Yes, those are sprinkles.

Sprinkle pen holder