Dish of the Week: Cupcakes

Greetings, food fans! Welcome back to Dish of the Week. Every seven days the SPM staff scours the city looking for the best examples of a given dish, which our intrepid tasters will then taste, rate and report back. We’ll let you know which burrito you should eat-o, which pizza pie catches our eye, which hamburger makes us say “DAMN!…burger.” We go through the process of finding the town’s best food so you won’t have to. What can we say? We’re givers.

This week’s dish is that classic food frequently found at childhood birthday parties and church bake sales, the delicious and sugary hand-held treats: Cupcakes!

In the early 19th century, food technology did not favor individual fans of baked goods. It took an extremely long time to bake anything in a hearth oven and it was very easy to burn your food beyond safe ingesting. Likewise, cakes were enormous. Ingredients for cakes were weighed rather than measured; thus, you had recipes calling for two pounds of butter, eight pounds of flour, and so on. Not an easy task for the baker, and certainly nothing a single person would want to eat in one sitting.

Around this time period, however, a shift occurred in kitchens across the country, and cooks began to save time by measuring their ingredients, rather than weighing them.

Cupcakes came to being during this time period and were so named for two reasons: ingredients for the tiny cakes were measured in cups rather than weighed (think cup cake versus pound cake), and the treats were often baked inside small containers, such as tea cups. As the world caught on, cup cakes became cupcakes, and the dish became more popular. In the past several years, dedicated cupcake bakeries have been popping up where hungry patrons in need of a quick desert can indulge.

…Unless you’re from England, where the treats are called fairy cakes. But those crazy Brits also call cookies biscuits, so who cares what they think?

For our tasting, we chose four of Tempe’s top cupcake stops and asked them to each give us a serving of their best.

The Contenders

Tammie Coe Cakes – Red Velvet Ooey Gooey Cupcake: Awesome name aside, the buttercream frosting is the star of this hefty treat — nearly two inches of it sit atop moist, maroon-colored cake.

Safeway – Bakery Cupcakes: Know those generic cupcakes you see at every office party that come in big plastic packages and are covered with giant rainbow sprinkles? Yeah, these are those.

Sprinkles Cupcakes– Red Velvet Cake: The most popular cupcake from the people who started the craze, this one is a Southern style light chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting.

The Tasting

We placed the cupcakes in unmarked boxes and allowed our judges a taste of each. Offerings were judged based on presentation, frosting, cake flavor and overall taste and given a score of 1-10, 10 being the highest. Here’s how we scored it:

Tammie Co.: “Like a little red snowball.” “Cream cheese yum!”

Presentation: 5.83
Frosting: 8.17
Cake: 8.17

Safeway: “Has a boring grocery store cupcake taste.” “Is that spraypaint?”

Presentation: 5.7
Frosting: 7.3
Cake: 6.33

Sprinkles: “Simple. Chic.” “The cake tastes like something from an easy bake oven.”

Presentation: 7.17
Frosting: 4.67
Cake: 6.0

The Results

First Place: Sprinkles
Second Place: Tammie Co.
Third Place: Safeway

The Final Verdict

This dish brought about our closest vote ever, with just one point separating first and second place! Sprinkles, however, came out victorious, showing why they’re known as the business that started the cupcake craze.

All the offerings, however, brought our judges much sugar-induced happiness, inspiring them to offer a toast. To the cupcake: An amazing advancement in dessert portability!

Reach the reporter at zfowle@asu.edu