Cupcake: n. A small cake baked in a cup-shaped container.

From Sprinkles in Beverly Hills to Magnolia in NYC, Cupcakes have taken over. Wait, wait, let me clarify: not just any old sort of cupcakes, but designer cupcakes.

Now, I’m not one to turn up my nose at designer things, especially designer bags (as my friends know), and when it comes to cupcakes, just like bags, the more expensive ones tend to look nicer, and most often, taste better (or in the case of bags, feel better). In St. Louis, where the Coffee Straws team lived for 4 years, there were two cupcake places: Jilly’s Cupcake Bar and The Cupcakery. I started my STL cupcake repetoire with Jilly’s, where the cupcakes are overly large, with plenty frosting, and come in a rainbow of colors and shapes. Although appealing visually, I don’t think they taste very good. The cake is dry and the frosting overpowering. I then was introduced to The Cupcakery, and went with my parents. The cupcakes there were perfection. Moist cake, appetizing size, perfect ratio of frosting to cake, and most importantly, they tasted great. These cupcakes were more plain looking, however, I took it on as my own personal mission to espouse the benefits of The Cupcakery and tried to get as many people as possible to go there and try what I thought to be the better cupcakes.

After finding The Cupcakery, I was excited to returned home to Phoenix and find Sprinkles. I tried their cupcakes last week and they were good — they had a moist cake and the frosting was delicious; yet they were too sweet for me. I’ve heard that there is one more cupcake place in town, and I’ll be trying that soon. I think it’s easy to have a cupcake that looks great but much harder to create one that tastes great. But of course, no matter what, I’ll eat any cupcake and want to talk about it later. So here’s the question for any coffeestraws visitor, tried any good cakes lately? Or, bought any good bags?