Cupcake Windfall Friday!

I usually try to refrain from sweets on Fridays, in light of Cupcake Wednesdays and weekend indulgences, but this week I had to make an exception. In my previous post, I mentioned making contact with Tracy Cowee, owner of TLCuppycakes, who works out of a licensed kitchen in Petersburg and often makes deliveries to Springfield. She had offered to stop at The State Journal-Register, where I work, and deliver "extras" she had brought along. That was an offer I couldn't refuse. (Want to order from her? Check out

	http://www.tlcuppycakes.com.)

In a parallel storylines, two of my colleages, Jayette Bolinski and Kathryn Rem (the SJ-R's food editor) were also dealing in cupcakes. Jayette, who is president of the PTO at her son's school, was preparing to host a cupcake-tasting experience that she had assembled as an item for a PTO auction. She had secured six dozen cupcakes -- a dozen from each of six bakeries -- for the event, and TLCuppycakes was one of the vendors she chose.

Meanwhile, Kathryn (whom Jayette invited to be a tasting expert of sorts at the "cupcake party") had, by chance, spent part of the day in the Petersburg area researching a story. While she was there, she stopped at two bakeries -- Mama's Bakery in Salisbury and OMGosh Bakery and Desserts in Petersburg. When she returned to the office Friday afternoon, she didn't come emtpy-handed -- she brought back two cupcakes from OMGosh and one from Mama's.

It was late afternoon when Tracy arrived at the SJ-R with two cupackes for me (an Ultimate Hot Cocoa and a Pumpkin Cream Cheese) and a dozen for Jayette (those flavors, plus Grandma's Apple Pie). I had asked Kathryn and Jayette to split my two cupcakes with me, and Kathyrn had generously offered to share her cupcakes with us, so we took a break, holed up in the office dining room and sampled the five cupcakes. Here are our evaluations:

We started with OMGosh's Snicker, which, as Kathryn noted, was "heavy!" OMGosh makes oversized cupcakes that appear to be nearly twice the size of your average, residential-kitchen cupcake. The Snicker, overall, was one of our favorites. The cake was lusciously moist, with a creamy caramel-peanut butter filling throughout the cake and moussy chocolate frosting that was flavorful but not too rich.We also loved the bite-size Snickers candy garnish.

Next up was Pumpkin from Mama's Bakery. It looked pretty good, but when we tasted it, two of us found the cake was dry, possibly a result of overbaking. The cream-cheese frosting, however, was a wonderful texture and flavor, likely made with confectioner's sugar, that I felt saved the cupcake.

We followed up Mama's Pumpkin with our other Thanksgiving-inspired cake, TLCuppycakes' Pumpkin Cream Cheese. This one blew us away, and I think we all agreed it was our favorite of the bunch. The cake, lusciously moist and perfectly spiced, embraced a creamy, spicy vanilla filling. We all agreed that the cake actually tasted like pumpkin pie. The buttery cream-cheese frosting was just the right complement to everything, and a candy-corn pumpkin topped the festive confection. There's no doubt that TLCuppycakes' Pumpkin Cream Cheese has made my Thanksgiving list of things to be thankful for!

Though we parted with pumpkin, we stuck with TLCuppycakes, moving on to Tracy's Ultimate Hot Cocoa cupcake. Tracy had told me that she used actual hot cocoa, made on the stove the old-fashioned way, in the batter for the Ultimate's light, springy chocolate cake. I give her extra points for taking that step, as well as for the whipped chocolate filling that was waiting to greet us from within. To further demonstrate the theme, she topped the cake with a vanilla frosting that tasted of real whipped cream. Garnishing the cocoa cake was a sprinkling of hot cooca mix.

Finally, we tackled OMGosh's massive Peppermint cake. This one was top-to-bottom peppermint, and we felt the flavor was a bit too strong -- and the peppermint extract had a "fake" taste to it that lingered longer on our palates than we liked. The cake was white, which I found interesting, since most other peppermint cucpakes I've seen have featured chocolate cake. The white wasn't a bad choice, but it was laced with the peppermint extract, as was the light, Cool Whip-like frosting. We felt the frosting may have contained shortening, which was a turnoff to two of us. I have to say, though, that I thought the light consistency of the frosting was a smart choice for the frosting. With a flavor as strong as peppermint, a heavier frosting might have been too overwhelming. I just wished it had been made with butter instead of shortening.

We love these occasional cupcake sampling sessions, and I joked that we need to do them quarterly. Who knows if we actually will, but one thing's for sure: It's hard to imagine a better afternoon workday break.