Atlanta Cupcake Tour, Part 4 of 7: Belly General Store
October 25, 2008
Lindsay and I wasted no time after our visits to Sweet Pockets and The Atlanta Cupcake Factory, and walked right over to Belly General Store.
What’s that? Visiting two cupcakeries in a day is plenty? Who do you think you are dealing with here, amateurs? Ha!
BELLY GENERAL STORE 772 N.Highland Ave. Atlanta, GA 30306
TREATS TASTED:
- Vanilla CC w/ Vanilla Frosting
- Vanilla CC w/ Chocolate Frosting
- Peanut Butter Cookie w/ Chocolate Piping
I really liked the rustic look of Belly General Store. I could sip away at a cup of coffee in this room every day if I lived closer to it.
This cafe had a ton of homemade goodies including fresh baked breads, pastries and of course, cupcakes. It looked like they had two peanut butter cookies - one that was long and flat, the other that was smaller and more round with chocolate piping. I tasted the latter which was really good. It was peanut buttery, not to crumbly and had a nice density to it that you could really sink your teeth into.
The chocolate was piped very neatly… it just got a little mussed on the way home. Still tasted good, though! Random side note, but it’s been bothering me and I finally figured out what this cookie looks like in this photo: the Bear Naked logo.
Their cupcakes had a nice homemade look that went with the homey rustic look of the cafe, so we were excited to try them. It says on their website that they were voted “Best Cupcakes” by Atlanta Magazine in 2004, but they’ve either gotten a new pastry chef or a new supplier since then. These cupcakes we bought didn’t look like the photos on their website and should certainly not qualify for any “Best Of” list.
Lindsay was particularly excited about the blue iced vanilla cupcake. But when she cut into the cupcake with a knife, it had a surprising amount of resistance. This was not a good sign, and just as we feared, it was a bad cupcake.
I didn’t take a close-up shot of the Vanilla frosted, but this is the Chocolate frosted. It got a little knocked around in the box on the way home, so pardon the messy looking icing. As you can see from the group shot above it was prettier at one time.
The truth is, I never tasted the chocolate frosted cupcake. The vanilla one was so bad that as a result, I had no desire to touch this one. The vanilla cake tasted like an old dense angel food cake and the icing was bad, overly sugary and you could taste the flavor of the blue food coloring. Yuck. It’s a bit of a shock to my system to say so, but I’d actually prefer to eat one of the bad Sweet Pockets cupcakes over this one, because at least they offered good frosting.
So the lesson learned here is that if you are going to stop in Belly General Store, maybe you should just stick with the Peanut Butter Cookie with Chocolate Piping. I really like this quote from a reviewer on Yelp, “Belly is like that kid in gym class. He’s got a lot of potential; he’s got the right equipment, the look, the determination. But he can’t quite get his ass off the mat.” That pretty much sums it up the experience here.
Stay tuned to find out what we thought of the next stop on the tour: The Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse!
For previous stops on the Atlanta Cupcake Tour, check out:
Part 1 of 7: The Highland Bakery
Part 3 of 7: The Atlanta Cupcake Factory