Sunday, June 22, 2008

The Chicago Cupcake Crawl


Oh yes, we did! While Dan went record shopping, my college pal Lindsey and I spent Friday afternoon scouting Chicago's best cupcakeries.


As organized as ever, Lindsey mapped out the cupcake trial.


Spumoni and deep chocolate blueberry lavender flavors at "
Cupcakes." We both loved the light creamy frosting but the cakes were a little dry. Spumoni was lovely. Blueberry was a little strange.


At
Molly's Cupcakes, we sampled the strawberry shortcake and the Ron Bennington's--a delicious dense chocolate cupcake filled with peanut butter, topped with a chocolate ganache and butterscotch. Ron was my favorite in the crawl (I even picked one up for Dan) and I think Lindsey favored the strawberry shortcake.


At the Martha Stewart recommended
Swirlz, we had the Banana Nutella and Malt Madness but were so over-sugared by that point that we barely finished them. I thought the banana was real nice.

While most Manhattan cupcake shops focus on creating old-time favorites (overly sweet standard what-your-grandma-used-to-make flavors), I noticed that the Chicago shops cared more about diversity, offering more flavors than I ever imagined.

The verdict: Molly's is tops in Chicago, though I know I still have a lot of experimenting to do in this town. There are more out there to try. We had to cut our tour short because we ran out of time. A great reason to come back (and of course, to catch up with Lindsey again which is always a real treat.)



I don't know what this means, but I like it.

1 comment:

Annette said...

WOW! I want to go on a Chicago cupcake crawl! They look really good! Glad you girls had fun.