Time to Retreat from Excessive Sweet

Well, we did what we said we would and skipped a weekend of cupcakes. Instead, I made brownie cupcakes with white chocolate chips.

This past Saturday, the fiance wanted to go back to good ol' Gigi's again. I've been trying to expand my horizons a little by trying different flavors. Good thing Gigi's throws in a few special cupcakes each day because they don't alternate the daily flavor menu (nor does any cupcakery as I've complained in previous posts).

The fiance stuck with some of his standard flavors (wedding cake and white midnight magic), but we each got a new one we haven't had from Gigi's called Golden Brown. Golden brown is basically a yellow cupcake with chocolate frosting and some chocolate chips. We both liked it. However, I think I like the one from Crave better.

My second cupcake was maple sugar walnut, which was walnut cake topped with maple buttercream frosting and candied walnuts. I was interested in the maple, but not too keen on the walnuts. So, I picked off most of the walnuts. All in all, it was a decent cupcake. It reminded me of the maple donuts from Dunkin Donuts.

My last cupcake was raspberry champagne. It was champagne cake with raspberry frosting and sugar crystals. I liked it, but at that point, I was so uncomfortably full that I could only eat half. I even ate each cupcake between one and two hour intervals, but it didn’t help.

I don't mean to be a buzz kill, but we have decided to limit our future Gigi's selections to two cupcakes each. We’re not complaining; we just realize we can't eat that much in one sitting.

A SWEET Treat

The start of 2012 has gone against my usual cupcake habit of a few times per month. I've already met that quota in the first two weeks of January. Anyway, this past weekend, we returned to SWEET. Similar to Celebrity, it's been quite sometime since we had SWEET's cupcakes. I recall our last experience with SWEET was a positive one, so we figured we would check them out again. They are located in Houston's CITYCENTRE, which was close to my alcohol promotion gig Saturday night. By the way, the use of all caps is how these establishments position themselves.

The fiance's selections were: carrot (top right), red velvet with sugar crystals (top middle) and vanilla bean (bottom left). All of which, he enjoyed. He said the carrot was better than the one he had at Celebrity. Mine were: salted caramel (top right), vanilla with chocolate (bottom middle) and strawberry (bottom right). Yes, they had salted caramel! Yay!

The ritual of strawberry was my first cupcake. It was white cake with some strawberry pieces and strawberry frosting. Overall, it had good flavor. Consistency of the cake was right except for some slight dryness on the edges that were not frosted.

Second cupcake was the vanilla with chocolate frosting. This was a fairly decent tasting cupcake. Similar issue with the dry edges as the strawberry. I think Celebrity did a little better than SWEET on this one, but Crave still beats everyone at this.

Last cupcake I had was the salted caramel. It was a caramel cake with caramel filling and frosting with a dash of sea salt on top. While it sounds like too much caramel, it was not. The cake was light and it had only a little caramel filling, so all was perfectly balanced. This one fulfilled my craving and was my favorite cupcake of the three.

Still not as big as Crave or Gigi's, SWEET's cupcakes seemed slightly bigger than Celebrity's. They also had a little more frosting than Celebrity, but nowhere near Gigi's and not completely frosted toward the edge. And their prices were a bit less at $3.00 per cupcake.

We'll probably take a break from the weekly cupcake frenzy this weekend. But we have an addiction; a weakness; and have been known to not always do what we say...

Cupcaking Celebrity Style

It has been over a year since we had Celebrity Cupcakes, so we decided to give them another try. From what I remember, our first experience was good. But we've been exposed to so many cupcake joints since then that we wanted to give it another go to see how they measure up.

The biggest draw of going there was that I wanted to try their fleur de sel cupcake, which is my latest salted caramel flavor craving. I remember seeing it the first time I went there and thought it was a little odd. Boy did I miss out! Much to my dismay, they were out of the fleur de sel. So, my flavor selections were: red velvet (middle left), vanilla with milk chocolate (middle right) and strawberry truffle (bottom left). Fiance's selections included: German chocolate (top left), vanilla bean (top right) and carrot (bottom right). I did not taste the fiance’s flavors, but he told me that the German chocolate and vanilla bean were good; the carrot was OK, but that he's had better carrot cupcakes at other cupcakeries.

My first cupcake was the strawberry truffle, which consists of dark chocolate cake with strawberry buttercream frosting. Overall, the cupcake was decent, but the cake part was a bit dry. It fell apart too easily.

Second cupcake I had was the vanilla with milk chocolate frosting. This was better than the strawberry truffle. This is a pretty basic cupcake, so not much to say about it; satisfying nonetheless.

The last cupcake I ate was the red velvet. This was by far the best one I tried out of all three. I'm glad I saved this one for last. The cake was the right consistency and had a nice, sweet cream cheese frosting.

Aside from the comments from my cupcake taste test, my main complaints with Celebrity's cupcakes are that the size is smaller than Crave or Gigi's even though they are the same price; and they don’t frost the entire top of the cupcake out to the edges.

Celebrity is tucked away near the West University shopping center. While the experience wasn't a disaster, there are better options out there that we prefer.

There are a few new cupcakes out there that I've been eyeing lately. Gigi's has advertised a gluten free white velvet cupcake. I’m not sure how gluten free foods compare to regular. I'd prefer a regular version, but if not, I'll give the gluten free one a shot. And Sprinkles has a s'more cupcake featured this month. So I'm hoping to give them a try soon and report back my findings.

Holiday Delights

Happy New Year! There has been a lot of dessert relishing over the holidays, but I'll just highlight a few experiences over the past few weeks.

At my regular day job, a group of us go out for lunch often. When each person in our group has a birthday, we take them out for lunch and devour cupcakes – usually from Crave. Just before Christmas, we had a birthday lunch for my coworker and friend, Rob. During our lunch, our waiter had a little mishap with the box of cupcakes, almost dropping them. While most of the cupcakes survived, Rob's unfortunately did not. It was a cupcake catastrophe! For consolation, the restaurant gave him a slice of cake and another coworker, Melissa, picked up a replacement cupcake as well.

For the month of December, Crave had a few holiday cupcakes; one of which I decided to try, which was gingerbread. It was a gingerbread cake with cream cheese frosting and a little fondant gingerbread man on top. It was definitely delish. I loved it! It's one of those things that comes around only once a year, so it's definitely crave-able.

The fiance and I (yes, we got engaged on Christmas) spent time with our families and encountered desserts everywhere we went. But one night while in the Tampa, Florida area, we ventured over to Gigi's. We had the Nodini cannoli (top left and bottom right), fiance had Italian cream (top right) and I had butterscotch dream (bottom left).

The first cupcake I chowed down on was butterscotch dream, which is butterscotch cake and filling with toasted vanilla frosting and rimmed with coconuts and pecans. I'm not a fan of coconut and pecans, so I picked them off (a bit tedious to do). The cake part was good, but it got even better when I got to the butterscotch filling.

Fiance's first cupcake was Italian cream, which was Italian cream cake topped with cream cheese frosting and toasted coconut. I tried a bite of his and thought it was pretty tasty.

Fiance and I were anxious to try our cannoli cupcakes, which is amaretto cake filled and topped with cannoli cream and topped with a mini cannoli. This cupcake did not disappoint. It was as good as we anticipated, so well worth trying. The cannoli on top was very yummy as was the rest of the cupcake.

Keep watching for the cupcake quests to continue this year! Even though I said I needed a break in my last post. Ha! Who am I kidding?