Well, Halloween has passed, and we’re just three weeks from Thanksgiving. I feel like autumn is slipping away. Halloween is one of my favorite times of year, though, so here’s a slightly belated post on my favorite scary cupcakes.

They’re my favorite… and also the only ones I have pictures of. My significant other and I used to have a birthday tradition of cupcakes. We also spent a good part of our adult lives together in Hoboken, where he worked just down the street from Carlos’ Bakery, of Cake Boss fame. I walked by that place for years on my way to the Barnes and Noble (gone), CVS, and the Path train. Of course, I begged a cupcake off him on his way home from work for any special occasion I could justify. His birthday is October 30th, so I would promise him an NYC cupcake in return for a Carlos’ Halloween treat.

That is, until the show Cake Boss came about. These photos are from 2008 because that was the last time we could actually get in to the bakery to buy something without standing in a ridiculously humongous line. Believe me, we tried. I have photos of the line.. but no photos of the cupcakes. It’s a bummer. No more will I stand on the corner of Washington and Newark and smash a cupcake into my face. (Don’t ask.)

Of course, these photos being from 2008 also has another implication. This was just 5 months after I got my SLR camera, and I had no macro lenses. These photos were shot with the kit lens, a really slow 18-55mm, before I knew anything about proper lighting and styling.

Halloween cupcakes

So, in 2008, I traded Lou a Whole Foods spider cupcake for a Carlos’s ghost cupcake. I love this photo because the ghost looks very worried. I think he thinks the spider is going to eat him, despite how positively friendly the spider looks. The spider reminds me of a puppy with his googly eyes.

Ghost cupcake from Carlos's Bakery

It was a red velvet cupcake with a fluffy white icing. I can’t remember how it tasted, but I always liked Carlos’ cupcakes. The cake was moist, the icing was supple. Nothing mindblowing, but solidly good.

A triptych of anxiety. Look, he has a lot on his mind. I mean, he’s dead, and he’s a cupcake.

Spider cupcake

And the spider. Well, he was adorable. Many a time had I admired the Whole Foods cupcakes from their glass case. They’re gorgeous, whether they have seasonal designs or flowers. I’ve had beautiful Whole Foods birthday cakes at work covered with vivid icing blossoms and leaves, and they were tasty, too. However, this cupcake.. well.. I think the Whole Foods icing takes color and shape so well because it is essentially lard. It is pure grease with no flavor at all, like what you find atop those tiny cakes at a Chinese Buffet.

You would suspect that the disk on top of the spider was a cookie of some sort, but no, it was just another lump of icing-lard dusted with cocoa. It was disgusting to bite into it. Truly. What about the cake? Well, it tasted like cornbread. Dry. Corny. This was an absolutely terrible cupcake. I’ve been turned off  WF cupcakes for life.

As I mentioned in the last post, I magically* came across a red velvet cake recently. I had a lot of good pictures of the exterior, but I also had several nice shots of a single slice of the cake that I also wanted to share – hence this part 2.

*I bought it at Shoprite

This photo reminds me of Christmas because of its red tones. Red velvet always seems to come out for Christmas in hats and santa outfits, so it makes sense. I’m not wild about the dark shadow on the right side of the slice, but I kept the shot because I like that it has an interesting background for once — the rest of the cake.

Red velvet cake

And here we go, straight into velvety goodness. That’s a good half-inch of icing per inch of cake. Mmm. The cake looks good, too – crumbly but somehow moist.

Slice of red velvet cake

This picture inexplicably makes me think of an animal lying on its side.

Red velvet cake

The only thing I regret about red velvet cake is how odd and almost bloody it looks when the red crumbs smear into the white icing after you cut it.

Top view

Ah, look at that beautiful layer of crumbs on the side. I love it. It’s a great presentation style for this kind of cake.

Side view

I am not so fond of this picture for some reason, but felt I was lacking a shot of the cake itself post-cutting. It is here for completeness’s sakes, but I think the cake itself is too messy to make this a good shot. The angles are erratic, and the crumbs have smeared into the frosting.

Red velvet cake interior

I really wanted to photograph cake or cupcakes recently. It felt like it had been too long. In the past few weeks, I had been taking pictures of odder desserts, and they’re quite challenging. Making tiny marzipan fruit look good when they’re just spraypainted pieces of almond paste is a chore. But cake – cake practically poses for you in the photo. Everyone loves cake!

That’s how I found myself with this red velvet cake. I somehow went my entire childhood without seeing or eating one. Once I became acquainted with them, I assumed it was just a cake with red food coloring and cream cheese frosting -  what you ordered  if you didn’t like the spicy base of a carrot cake.

Red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting

Not so. The key ingredients are buttermilk, cocoa, and vinegar. Yes, this qualifies as a chocolate cake. In the old days, when the buttermilk and/or vinegar reacted with the cocoa, it turned it from brown to a reddish hue. Bakers decided to run with it and add food coloring to get the crimson shade we know now.

Side view

Ah, frosting. This particular cake had a cheese cake frosting with a tang to it. It was tarter than what I associate with cream cheese frostings, so either they pulled back on the sugar to keep things interesting, or they added buttermilk to the frosting as well. I can’t find a recipe for a buttermilk/cream  cheese frosting, so that seems unlikely. It was delicious, but I don’t remember tasting the cake at all – certainly no chocolate flavor.

Icing stars.. flowers.. flourishes.. what are they called?

I not only ate one of these flourishes off my slice, I scraped another off the cake just to eat it. It was extremely rich so I was a little overwhelmed, but there’s just a certain amount of glee involved in doing that that transcends the actual frosting flavor.

Icing flourish

I assume they named it red velvet because the interior, with its buttermilk-based crumb, looks a little like that plushy fabric. I think dusting the outside with the red crumbs makes that even effect even more pronounced. In the photo below, the crumb looks like the remnants of fabric that come off unhemmed velvet. I find myself wondering, too, how they got the crumbs on the side. Did they roll the cake in them…? Throw them on? Both ways seem messy and inconsistent.

The crumbs do look like velvet

Oh, by the way, this lovely cake came from a supermarket. Surprised? Here are some recipes if you’d like to make your own.

Joy of Baking’s Tested Red Velvet Cake Recipe

Epicurious’s Red Velvet Cupcakes

Bakerella’s Red Velvet Cake

One more icing flourish for the road after you click More.

Read the rest of this entry »

I went to a barbecue on Labor Day, as I imagine most people did. It was a backyard affair, but a considerable one with 20-30 kids and adults running about. Naturally, we had a lot of food; one of my shots of the grill had 20 hotdogs and 10 burgers on it, and that was just round one. The meat was further complemented with sides, salad, and ziti. This bounty continued to our dessert table, which included three pies, a fruit salad, ganache cups (mine!), a carrot cake, and a butterfly cake.

The butterfly cake was specially chosen by my mother because my late grandmother loved butterflies. She likes to include reminders of her in our celebrations, even though several years have passed. Everyone was so excited to see it unboxed. The adults called me over to take pictures of it because the children were in fact circling hungrily and impatiently. When we cut into it, we found a.. pudding cake. Instead of fruit or mousse, the cake was filled with vanilla pudding. I was really surprised – I cannot remember the last time I ate one of those. It makes sense as a party choice, though, because vanilla pudding as probably as inoffensive as it gets. It was a little boring and bland, but if one wanted flavor, the carrot cake was a-waiting.

From a photographic perspective, a red table cloth would not have been my first choice as a backdrop here because I prefer neutral tones, but it works with the yellow, green, and gold colors of the cake. I actually really like the gold airbrushing on the sides. It’s a little random — who makes gold cakes? who serves them? – but it’s a nice backdrop to the other, simpler hues.

Butterfly and ladybug cake

First things first: no, the butterfly was not edible. It is sitting in a bed of chocolate crunchies, the likes of which you find in Carvel ice-cream cakes, which were meant to be soil. The strange, plastic-like pieces strewn on the icing are so-called magic sprinkles. They are basically transparent glitter flakes, meant to add shine to your dessert, but I don’t think they were necessary here.

Butterfly in the background

The ladybugs were ‘edible’. They were hard sugar-candy (gum paste), like the flowers you find on a wedding cake, so you could eat them, but it’d be like chewing on a jawbreaker.

Ladybug closeup

I selected this side shot because I think it, along with the above ladybug picture, highlights the sheer height and texture of this buttercream icing. It was dramatically fluted, rippled, and layered on the cake in a way you rarely see; most birthday cakes stick with classic swirls, and most wedding cakes use fondant for these details.

Leaf detail

I just like this photograph. It doesn’t necessarily convey any new information about this cake, but the swirls of the yellow icing, the contrast of the green leaves, and the fading gold of the undercoat simply please my eye.

Icing leaves

I had a birthday recently and decided to take a break from my Colorado photos to post photos on my cake. If you’ve read this blog before, you know I love cake. Among cake, my true love is buttercream birthday cake. When I get cake in the supermarket, at parties, in the store, it is all with the comparison to birthday cake in my mind.

I grew up in a predominantly Italian town in New Jersey (shocker!). We had a lot of good pizza within 5 minutes and a very special Italian bakery about 15? minutes away. Baldanza‘s is a standalone bakery by a bowling alley on a main road covered with aging stores and strip malls. Despite the raggedy appearance of the area, you smelled this bakery every time you drove by. The scent of baked goods managed to penetrate even your closed windows. It was awesome.

One of my favorite parts of this shot is the rounded poof of frosting in the lower right corner. Very elegant.

When my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, there was nothing on my list, because I generally don’t want a lot, and if I want it, I just get it myself. However, this cake had been in my mind for awhile. I hadn’t had it in maybe 10 years, and now that I had a hobby of photographing food and writing about it, I realized everything was falling short when compared to my beloved Baldanza’s cake.

The first reason I hadn’t had this cake in so long was because, as you may know from my About page, I lost about 100 lbs a few years ago and basically abstained from anything delicious for 5 whole years. (3 to lose the weight, 2 to keep it off.) I’ve since introduced all foods back into my life so this was no longer an issue.

The second reason is that I lived at least 90 minutes from the bakery. My mother had also moved at least 45 minutes away, so I asked her for the cake, but told her not to do it if it would be a pain. As you can see, she came through. She drove down to the Jersey Shore in the wee hours of the morning, picked up the cake, then tried to drive home while holding it in the passenger seat so it wouldn’t fall off and die a tragic death.

Mm, birthday cake.

The extra variable in this equation is the summer heat. Summer + buttercream = melting cake. She packed cold sodas around it to keep it cool in desperation.

Luckily, it worked! I got my cake, and I was so very excited. As you can see, it is white Italian buttercream, lavender flowers, and lemon filling. Yes, lemon. My many, many cake tastings in the past 5 years have brought me to a very unusual conclusion: I love lemon filling. Not chocolate. Not strawberry. Lemon. Something about the brightness of the taste cuts through the buttercream in the most delightful way.

Action shot! We cut the cake.

The icing on this was great. I’ve had many low-quality buttercreams in my life, and that doesn’t even count ‘bettercream’, which isn’t pretending to be the real thing. I’ve even made my own buttercream in search of the perfect icing, and it’s just not the same. I usually make American buttercream, which is just butter+powdered sugar, and this was definitely NOT that. I also suspect it was not French buttercream, which uses egg yolks, because it was so white. That leaves Italian buttercream or Swiss Meringue buttercream. They’re both very similar and basically add corn syrup and egg white. I would guess, since this was an Italian bakery, that they used Italian buttercream, but who knows.

Glistening buttercream

It’s a fork shot! I ate my flower first, and the buttercream tasted as I remembered it; delightfully smooth, sweet, with no taste of butter. My mother detected a hint of rum in it, and I agree that there was more than a vanilla flavoring there. I want to emphasize that it’s not the taste but the mouthfeel and the whole experience. This buttercream might not make you blink until you’ve had so many bad ones, and then you really appreciate it.

My purple flower

More cake shots after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

I am back from Colorado! What an amazing place. Within a few hours of deplaning, I found myself on a Culinary Connectors tour, wandering around the Highlands district of Denver. I toured 2 restaurants, a wine store, and a cupcake shop. This cupcake shop has led me to deem this Cupcake Week because I have so many wonderful pictures from my tour and subsequent purchases from them.

The shop in question is Happy Cakes, consistently rated one of the best cupcake shops in Denver. The two owners first started baking in their homes, then moved into a shared kitchen with a cooking school. After a third owner, they moved into their own shop. It’s quite small. I would say the front and back could fit in about two parking spaces.

This cupcake is a liquor-infused creation. Given how many I’ve featured on this blog alone, I am pretty sure that booze is the #1 trendy thing in the cupcake world. Vegan might be #2. This bad girl is a Pomegranate Margarita. The cupcake is flavored like a margarita – very nice, a little limey – and the icing is so tart and flavorful because it is made with pomegranate liqueur. It was a delight to eat it – very bold. (The icing is cracked because I had to carry these all over Denver to find a place where the buildings didn’t block the setting sun. )

Pomegranate Margarita cupcake

I really like their practice of only doing the sugar in a v-like formation on one side of the cupcake. It’s a very distinctive, lovely look that also doesn’t add too much sugar to the icing.

Pink frosting on a Pomegranate Margarita cupcake

I love my close-up sprinkle/sugar shots as you know. The square, faceted shape of these pink and purple sugar crystals makes them look like emerald-cut jewels. Speaking of emeralds, I adore the rogue green sugar crystal in the middle.

Aerial view

Extreme pink sugar closeup

Good cake to icing ratio. I like to not have to ‘save’ my icing. I don’t want to be afraid that I’ll run out before I finish the cupcake part! (Remember when we were young and used to lick off the icing first?) As you can see, the cake had a good crumb, and the icing was on the denser side.

I call this the bitten side view

Again, that magnificent sugar coating adds so much to the picture; the texture on the right is wonderful.

Pomegranate Margarita frosting

Sweet Avenue Bake Shop is a local vegan cupcake bakery I’ve discussed a few times. I most recently had margarita and pina colada cupcakes from their new liquor-themed line. I saw a Tweet today that they had a new flavor – Jack and Coke. I didn’t know what they meant at first, I’m embarrassed to say, but after further reading, I found out this was a cola-flavored cupcake, with a cola-caramel filling, and whiskey frosting. My significant other loves soda, whiskey, and rum, so I knew this was the perfect Friday pick-me-up. I got two Jack and Coke’s and a S’mores cupcake that I’ll post about later.

As I said, these are vegan cupcakes. That means they are made with no meat or dairy products – no milk, eggs, or butter. They are some of the best cupcakes I’ve had.

Jack and Coke cupcakes

These fat icing swirls make me think of the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man in Ghostbusters. This icing does have a slightly marshmellow-like texture to it; it’s very thick and doesn’t instantly dissolve into butter in your mouth. It still coats your mouth with sweet goodness, but it is a little more substantial than butter+confectioner’s sugar. Vegan frostings typically use shortening instead of butter, and that’d explain the longer-lasting mouthfeel, but this doesn’t taste artificial enough to be shortening so I’m not sure of the source of the magic here.

Sweet Avenue cupcakes

The whiskey flavor came through wonderfully. I felt like I was really consuming alcohol. (That said, I almost never drink, I’ve been to a bar maybe three times, and I’ve only had whiskey once, in egg nog, last Christmas. It doesn’t take much to overload my palate with whiskey flavor.) I really enjoyed this, much more than the margarita and pina colada icings I had. The whiskey stood up well to that thicker texture I mentioned, and it really stuck with you as it coated your mouth. The only downside is that it overwhelmed the cupcake part a bit, and I was bracing myself for a bran-muffin flavor because the cupcake looked like one. The cola flavor is much more delicate than the icing, and I don’t think I can accurately say I now know what a cola-flavored cupcake tastes like. Unlike a bran muffin, though, the cake was very moist with a great crumb.

Whiskey icing

These sugar crystals are courtesy of my new 60mm macro lens. Love.

Sugar crystal close up

To bring things back to reality, here’s the Jack and Coke after Lou got to it. I scarfed down my cupcake in about 20 seconds this evening with my bare hands and didn’t take time for pictures, but he delicately sampled it with a fork and put most of it away for later. Yeah, I don’t get it, either. However, his odd eating methods usually mean he loses interest or forgets about it, which means I get more cupcake later. Maybe I’ll be able to concentrate more on the cola flavor in the second go-around.

After a Lou-sized bite

There’s a bonus sugar crystal photo after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Fourth of July! Here are some fun food facts for you: you have a more than 1-in-4 chance that the hot dogs you consume tomorrow came from Iowa, and a 1 in 6 chance that your beef came from Texas.  That’s my obligatory mention of protein before we dive into the good stuff: cupcakes!

This cupcake came from Zaro’s in New York’s Penn Station. They make pretty baked goods for the tourists to buy, and if I have time before my train home from work, I’ll sometimes impulsively buy something. Unfortunately, they don’t taste as nice as they look — the sprinkles stain your tongue, and the icing is too lard-like.

Still, so photogenic. I like how the flag is blurred here.

Swirly icing

I’m fond of how the darkness of the flag matches the darkness of the cake. This photo also gives you a sense of just how much icing there was; look at the height.

Fourth of July cupcake

After I ate most of the cupcake, I planted a flag on it to show my domination of it.

I toppled it and conquered it

All that’s left is a smear of red icing.

The empty plate