I’ll say it now: I was not impressed.
The atmosphere at Baked and Wired seemed very promising when I first walked in. The store is divided in half–on one side you go to get your drinks and morning pastries, and the other side is dedicated solely to the sale of baked goods, your cupcakes, your brownies, different types of sweet bars, etc. The iced green tea that I had was refreshing, and I drank most of it while trying to decide which flavors of cupcakes to buy.
I let the girl at the baked goods counter know that I wanted a box of four, and asked her for her recommendations. Her first one was the carrot cake, but I had to say no to that when she told me that it has nuts in it (I really don’t do actual nuts in cake…it’s one of my weird quirks). She also recommended their strawberry and their red velvet, so I said yes to those. I saw that they had a peanut butter and chocolate cupcake, so naturally I had to try one to compare it to those of the other cupcakeries I have recently visited. My final choice was along the same lines: the chocolate cake with dark chocolate frosting. For my own personal enjoyment, and for the sake of comparison.
When I first opened the different and interesting wrapper to the red velvet cupcake, I was taken aback at first. Instead of a consistent red coloring throughout the cake, there were dark brown splotches. It made the red seem less vibrant, and, to me, this is a sign that someone in the back wasn’t paying attention when the mixer was going. The cake itself tasted like red velvet, but the frosting seemed to be more buttercream than it was cream cheese. There were hints that the flavor was hiding in there somewhere, but I had to go looking for it.
I had really been looking forward to the strawberry cupcake, since the girl at the counter had recommended it to me on the basis that it had real, whole strawberry pieces in the cake. I tried a bit of the frosting before even biting into the cupcake, and was immediately thrown back to my hometown and my family’s favorite place to get breakfast and coffee: Dunkin’ Donuts. The frosting reminded me of the strawberry icing you find on a Dunkin’ Donuts donut. It was sugary, grainy, and tasted artificial. The cake itself was dense with little flavor besides the strawberry pieces. It was almost as if they were trying to go for a shortcake-like cake, but failed to produce the buttery rich flavors that are usually a part of that experience. There was also too much frosting on this one. I took most of it off.
The peanut butter chocolate was also a let down. When I held it in my hand, it was heavy, like i was holding a large cup of water. Before I could even remove the excess frosting, it did it for me. Half of the frosting slid off of the cupcake the moment the wrapper came off. The flavor of the frosting did not compensate–it tasted more like dry roasted peanuts tossed into buttercream frosting instead of smooth creamy peanut butter frosting. The chocolate cake was moist and had a good chocolate flavor to it, but I was surprised to find small granules of some unknown substance in the cupcake–I think that it might have been ground up peanut pieces. I told the girl at the counter that I did not like nuts in my cake, so I was particularly miffed. If they’re not nuts, I have no idea what I was eating.
I will update the entry once I’ve tried the chocolate one, but I don’t think that I would be going back to Baked and Wired even if the chocolate cupcake blew me half way to China.
