Express' Best of 2009 Competition!

Tired of looking at these "Best Of" competitions and seeing Cakelove round the top 3? Me too! Does it confuse and anger you? Me too! So don't forgot to check out the Best of 2009 Competition and vote for your favorites! (Most importantly, your favorite cupcake spot and favorite bakery).

From now through Friday, Oct. 16, you can vote for your favorite D.C. area people, places and things in more than 100 categories; the finalists in those categories were chosen by Express readers last month. You can (and should) comment, too -- they want to hear why you love what you love. The winners will be announced Friday, Nov. 6, in a special issue of Express.

The finalists in the Cupcake Category are: Baked & Wired, Cakelove, Georgetown Cupcake, Hello Cupcake, and Red Velvet Cupcakery.

The finalists in the Bakery Category are: Best Buns, Cakelove, Firehook, Le Pain Quotidien, and Sticky Fingers Bakery (Best Buns and Sticky Fingers both serve up cupcakes).

Go Vote!!

Get Your Fourth of July Cupcakes!

If you're planning on buying, not baking, your patriotic cupcakes this Fourth of July, I've got you covered. Check out this list of local places who will be selling the festive treats all week long:

Bittersweet Catering
Flag Cupcakes made up of white cake with Vanilla Buttercream, decorated with red stripes and blue stars, for $3.00/each

Buzz Bakery

Patriotic Themed Cupcakes

Cakelove

Yellow butter cupcakes topped with buttercream, raspberries, and blueberries.

Cupcakes Actually
Choose from Apple Struedel with Cream Cheese Frosting, Simply Red with Cream Cheese Frosting and Vanilla Bean with Vanilla Buttercream. Each cupcake is adorned with a handmade 4th of July themed decoration.

Georgetown Cupcake
Fourth of July Cupcakes are available every day during the holiday week and throughout the holiday month by special order.

Heidelberg Pastry Shoppe

Heidelberg's Patriotic Themed Cupcakes are either Yellow or Chocolate cake with white icing and red, white and blue sprinkles on top. They're $1.25 each.

Hello Cupcake

Fourth of July Cupcakes are available all this week. They are the "HC Originals," (vanilla or chocolate cake with vanilla or chocolate buttercream frosting) with special Independence Day decorations and are the normal price, $3/each. Note their holiday hours: 10am-9pm July 3rd, and 10am-5pm July 4th.

Red Velvet Cupcakery

RVC will definitely be selling patriotic-themed cupcakes this week, but weren't able to tell me which flavors they'll be using as the baker hasn't decided yet. The themed-cupcakes will probably only be available Saturday, Friday at the earliest!

Springmill Bread Company
All the local locations are baking Patriotic Themed Cupcakes, priced at 4 for $8.

Know of anywhere else? Let me know and I'll add it to the list!

Washingtonian Mag's Best of Washington

Each year Washingtonian Magazine polls their readers to get the lowdown out what everyone deems the best restaurants, celebrities, nightlife, and more. For the past couple years, they've made sure to poll on who has the best cupcakes - and the results are in!

Photograph by Renne Comet

1. Georgetown Cupcake

2. CakeLove

3. Baked & Wired

I can't believe it happened AGAIN this year!!!! How on EARTH does Cakelove keep pulling this off?! Shock. Calming down now...the top 3 remain the same from last year's results, only Cakelove has dropped down to the second spot while Georgetown Cupcake moved from 2nd place to 1st place. Baked & Wired has remained in the 3rd best slot.

The July issue is on stands now.

Bethesda Magazine Taste Test's Cupcakes

Keeping up with Washington Post's Cupcake Wars, Bethesda Magazine took it upon themselves to find the Bethesda area's best cupcakes in their most recent issue. "Mark Ramsdell, head instructor of the pastry arts program at L'Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, was the expert judge for the blind taste test while members of the Bethesda Magazine staff were also judges."

The team purchased yellow cupcakes with chocolate icing at five local cupcake shops. You won't see Fancy Cakes by Leslie in the competition though, as they weren't set to open until after the Magazine's deadline.

The big winner of the contest? Just Cakes! And guess who came in dead last? You guessed it, Cakelove. Here's a list of the competitors, listed in order of how they finished in the contest:

Just Cakes

4849 Rugby Avenue

301-718-5111

Whole Foods

5269 River Road

301-984-4860

Breads Unlimited

6914 Arlington Road

301-656-2340

Spring Mill Bread Co.

4961 Elm Street

301-654-7970

Cakelove

935 Ellsworth Drive

301-565-2253

Cakelove Election Day Discount

Not that I like to promote anything having to do with Cakelove since I think their cupcakes are awful, but for those of you who disagree, walk yourself on over to their 15th & U Street location and flash your "I Voted" sticker to get $1 off your cupcakes.

(And just an FYI - Here's a couple other Election Day Food Freebies: Show your sticker at Krispy Kreme and get a free donut, show it at Starbucks and get a free tall coffee, show it at California Tortilla for a free Taco, show it at Ben & Jerry's from 5-8pm for a free scoop of ice-cream, and last but not least, some Chick-fil-a's are giving away a free original sandwich to voters, but only if you turn in your sticker!)

Unrelated to the election, they're also running a promotion to Celebrate their 6th Birthday where you can buy 5 cupcakes and get the 6th one free. One catch though - you can only get this special on the 6th of each month.

5th Annual Cupcakes for a Cause

This week is the 5th Annual Cupcakes for a Cause week! How can you take part? All you have to do is visit a participating bakery from October 20th through 26th and purchase one of their special CancerCare for Kids Cupcakes and you will be helping save a child's life. Participating bakeries in Maryland, DC, and Virginia include:

Georgetown Cupcake
1209 Potomac Street NW
Washington DC 20007

CakeLove
935 Ellsworth Drive
Silver Spring MD 20910

Couture Cupcakes
Potomac MD 20854

The Baltimore Cupcake Company
1433 East Fort Avenue
Baltimore MD 21230

Blackbird Bakery
56 Piedmont Avenue
Bristol VA 24201

Edibles Incredible Desserts
11917 Freedom Drive
Reston VA 20190

Edibles Incredible Desserts
22855 Brambleton Plaza, 103
Brambleton VA 20148

Reese's Cupcakes
14420 Rosebud Road
Chesterfield VA 23838

Roxie's Cupcakes
5521 Forestview Drive
Virginia Beach VA 23455

Don't have time to make it into a bakery this week? Then try to find a minute to hop over to the Cupcakes for a Cause website and send a friend an ecupcake! $1 will be donated for each ecupcake that is sent (up to $10,000). Right now only 947 ecupcakes have been sent, so we have a ways to go! Click here to get started creating your own ecupcake, or selecting a premade one!

If you're a bakery who would like to participate in Cupcakes for a Cause but haven't had a chance to sign up yet, click here to get yourself on the list.

So if you were looking for an excuse to eat some cupcakes, now you've got it! Get out and get yourself a CancerCare for Kids Cupcake!

Cupcakes Cupcakes Cupcakes

Cupcakes have taken over the newspapers today, in both the Express and in the Washington Post. I'll get to the third week of the Cupcake Wars in the next posting; this post is in regards to "The Lion of the Dessert" article in the Express this morning.

It seems that Fiona Zublin, whose articles I've blogged about before, took a cue from the Post Food Editor Joe Yonan and conducted a cupcake taste test of her own. Zublin and a team of taste testers scooped up some cupcakes from Cakelove, Georgetown Cupcake, and Hello Cupcake to pit them against eachother in a battle of the tastiest. And no surprise here, Hello Cupcake came out on top. Here's what Zublin had to say:

CAKELOVE
"The beloved D.C. stalwart did not fare well with testers. The frosting (even peanut butter frosting, which generally has the same consistency as, well, peanut butter) was runny, and the cake - particularly the vanilla cake - was dry and too crumbly."

GEORGETOWN CUPCAKE
"This was D.C.'s first all-cupcakes, all-the-time joint, and the store has gotton less crowded than it once was. Its selection is still lovely, though, with rich, thick cake and a tasty, gooey frosting. The carrot cake was the best of the bunch (if you like carrot cake, that is)."

HELLO CUPCAKE
"This is the newest addition to D.C.'s cupcake cavalcade, but it has appeal in more than just novelty: These are the best cupcakes around. Their flavors are creative, and the cake bits are moist and tasty. But the real triumph in these cupcakes is the frosting - it's intensely flavorful and rich without making you feel ill. It never overpowers the rest of the cupcake, which is unexpected, because each cake comes topped with a mound of frosting the size of K2."

Zublin's reviews reaffirm the general consensus of the three shops, don't you think? Speaking of Georgetown Cupcake, I have heard they've got a new seasonal flavor, Caramel Apple, which is supposed to be pretty sweet and tasty. Anyone tried it yet? While you know I'm more of a Hello Cupcake than Georgetown Cupcake girl, I will be on the lookout for Gtown's Gingerbread cupcake this December!

Wasington Post Cupcake Taste Test

It looks like Joe Yonan, the Food Editor of the Washington Post, has taken it upon himself to conduct a six-week cupcake taste test in and around the nation's capital in order to find the best cupcake in town. Sounds like a good idea to me!


Sticky Fingers Cupcakes, Photo Credit - The Washington Post (James Thresher)

One of the bakeries Yonan has tried so far is Sticky Finger's Bakery in Columbia Heights (where our DC/Metro Cupcake Group had our second meetup). He says that "Sticky Fingers's cookie cupcake earned high marks for presentation, but the taste just didn't win us over." I would have to agree. When I tried a couple different flavors back in July for our meetup, the cake and the frosting had a very flour-like taste to them and weren't something I would eat again.


Cakelove Cupcakes, Photo Credit - The Washington Post (James Thresher)

The other bakery Yonan has sampled is (gag) Cakelove/Love Cafe (same thing). Yonan tried a couple different flavors, one of which he writes "The thin layer of ganache-like frosting gave this CakeLove cupcake a Boston Creme Pie look, but the dry dessert had nothing else in common with its creamy counterpart." Of the second cupcake he tried, Yonan says "a tart cream-cheese frosting kicked this CakeLove cupcake up a notch. It scored a 4.5 on our 10-point scale." Kicked it up a notch to still score less than 5 out of 10 points? Hahahahaha. That pretty much sums up what everyone has said all along about Cakelove - gross, dry and a waste of money. Yonan also adds that "LoveCafe is hardly generous with its frosting. A thin shmear can hardly quench a dry cupcake."

I like this guy! Stay tuned for more of his cupcake adventures in days to come.

Cakelove...Still Bad.

Cupcakes Take The Cake just did a posting on "the Cakelove backlash," and referenced my recent posting on the shock of Cakelove being listed at the top of Washingtonian Magazine's Best of DC list. Some readers who have commented on the CTTC post have described the Cakelove cupcakes as tasteless, horrible, dry, and nasty, ha. Check it out by clicking here.

I would like to point out that one of my blog readers, Emily from Washingtonian Magazine, did point out that this was not actually decided on by the magizine itself, but by more than 2500 Washingtonians. As Emily suggested, maybe not everyone is aware of all the choices out there?

Best of Washington?

In a post from last month, I shared that Washingtonian Magazine will be throwing their Best of Party on July 8, from 7-10pm at the National Building Museum. Building up to that, Washingtonian Magazine released their Best of Washington July issue later last month. I didn't get around to picking up my copy until yesterday afternoon, but to my utter horror I flipped it open and read the following:

Best Place for Great Cupcakes

1. Cakelove

2. Georgetown Cupcake

3. Baked 'n Wired

WHAT!?!?! Cakelove is number one?!?! Who voted on this and what drugs were they on?!!?! Of all the people who have read this blog, commented on it, or engaged in a cupcake discussion with me (which is quite a lot), not one single person has had anything positive to say about Cakelove cupcakes. If you're reading this and you've enjoyed Cakelove's cupcakes, please share with the rest of us what exactly you enjoyed, because I am rather confused.

Aside from my obvious disagreement with Cakelove's appearance on the "Best Of" list, I do agree that Baked & Wired deserves a spot up there. Unfortunately, Hello Cupcake hasn't opened yet, because I firmly believe that once owner Penny Karas opens up shop later this month and Washingtonian's have the opportunity to taste her treats, Hello Cupcake will be making an appearance on that top 3 (at number one, in my opinion).

I still have not tasted Georgetown Cupcake's goods. I know I know, but I just haven't got around to placing an order ahead of time since I refuse to wait in that line. I'll get on that in the next couple weeks.

What do you think of the list? Anyone you think should have been included or left off? Let's discuss!!

Not feeling the (Cake)Love

Tonight when I was swinging by Nordstrom to pick up a few things for my Ocean City trip tomorrow, I remembered a new Cakelove store just opened up in the Tysons eatery. Excited to finally try this DC area sensation, I walked over and picked out four flavors...New German Chocolate, Peanut Butter on Chocolate, Lemon Vanilla, and the Gluten Free cupcake.

I have never been so disappointed in my life! Let's start from the beginning.

First I tried the Lemon Vanilla. Woah. While the Vanilla cake was decent, all you could taste here was the lemon icing. It was extremely overpowering. If you love lemon, you will like this cupcake. Otherwise, you will be disappointed.

Second was the Gluten Free Cupcake. I mainly chose this cupcake to see if a gluten free cupcake could taste halfway decent...and that's about all I can say for it: it was halfway decent. It was very bland, topped with a cream cheese icing (which I feel like I have made tastier versions of in my own kitchen). While not bad for a gluten free cupcake, it certainly was not good.

Next I tried the Peanut Butter on Chocolate. The Chocolate Cupcake I had from Just Cakes last week was much more flavorful than this. And to make it worse, as with the Lemon Cupcake, all you could taste here was the oily peanut butter frosting.

Last up was the New German Chocolate. It was definitely the most original tasting one of the group, but was by no means GREAT, or even worth finishing.

Extremely disappointed, I went onto Cakelove's website and found out that ALL of the cupcakes are either Vanilla or Chocolate cake, only the icing changes. How terribly lazy! If you're going to sell only two flavors of cake, the cake needs to be AMAZING! It was nowhere close. And not only are the icing flavors too overpowering, they're not even good. I was also disappointed with the presentation. The 18 year olds working the counter obviously slapped some icing on with a big knife and called it a day.

Sorry Cakelove, but there was absolutely no love in these cupcakes.