Cupcakes in Dallas, TX
August 7, 2008
If you’ve been a regular visitor of The CPB Gallery you know that I live in the NJ and recently took a road trip to Michigan and Illinois. This being the case, most of my cafe reviews revolve around the NY / NJ area but lately I’ve been blabbering about some of the many treats I ate on my trip to the midwest.
However, the other day I received an e-mail from a reader in Dallas, Texas asking about cupcakeries in her area that might be as good as Molly’s in Chicago, Illinois (which I loved). I’ve never been to Texas and wasn’t up on my knowledge of southern cupcakeries, so I did a bit of research.
Turns out The Dallas Morning News made a list back in 2005 (I didn’t look up every bakery on this list, so it could be a little outdated) of various cupcakeries in the area, in response to the crazy demand for cupcakes. Check out the full list at their site, which also includes recipes for Key Lime Pie Cupcakes with Coconut Meringue, Warm Chocolate Cakes with Molten Centers and Kid-Simple Cupcakes.
In related food dork news, a “Best Of” list was made by The Dallas Observer, chronicling the stand-outs in many different food cateories. I’m not sure how I encountered this list on my search as it doesn’t have any cupcakes on it, but it does include the best chocolate chip cookie in the area, and honestly if I had to decide between cupcakes and chocolate chip cookies, I would take the latter any day of the week. I’m old fashioned, what can I say? Luckily there was a tie for best cookie, so you can try one from J D’s Chippery and one from The Great Harvest Bread Co. and compare. In fact it might be so hard to decide, you should probably pick up extras just to make sure you’ve reached the right conclusion. ;)
One last Dallas spot I’m going to highlight is the ever talked about Sprinkles. Celebrities love them, regular people love them, but this reviewer is one of a few I’ve found that wasn’t nuts about them. She only gave Sprinkles a mediocre review noting, “I must say the peanut butter chocolate was really delicious … well, that is I loved the icing, but thought the cake part was just OK. My taste test concluded that on the ones where the icing was a 10, the cake part of the cupcake was only like a 6 or 7. Some of my friends thought I was nuts, but hey, we all have our likes and dislikes. Anyways, some of my friends could eat pure butter and find it delicious, so there you go.” Ouch, way to diss your friends, there.
In good news, if you don’t want to spend $3.25 for a Sprinkles cupcake even if Oprah thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread, you can pick up their cupcake mix at Williams-Sonoma and make em at home. The mix even comes with the fancy little dots to decorate em with, and you don’t have to wait on line for 45 minutes to get them.
(Of course, if I were in the area, I’d still sprint over there for this chocolate peanut butter cupcake.)