In the beginning...November 2008

We're not sure where our love of cupcakes started, or where we got the idea to try as many cupcakes as we could, but it all began with a bucket list trip to New York City to see the Macy's Day Parade in 2008. Anne had dreamt of seeing the parade for years, so Courtney and her man agreed to meet her and her man there for the holiday weekend. We planned for months and swapped lists several times. Yes, we saw the parade and it was awesome. Yes, we saw some sites and they were great too. But really, it was all about the cupcakes. In 4 days, we visited 4 bakeries. Here are some pics and quick reviews:

These are our choices from Magnolia Bakery. Chocolate vanilla for Anne and vanilla vanilla for Courtney. They were both moist with lots of icing for icing lovers! On a sprinkle scale of 1-5, we give it a 4!

Finding an open cupcake store on Thanksgiving was a complete surprise for us. We didn't even have Crumbs on the list. We're so glad we happened upon the place. We don't remember what we ordered anymore, but we do remember that it was the first time we saw a wide variety of gourmet cupcake choices. Courtney says it was her favorite. We'll go ahead and give it a sprinkles score of 4.5.

Cupcake Cafe had some beautiful flowers on top of the cupcakes and some great dancing cupcakes in the store, but that's where the good review stops. The cake was stale, the icing was greasy and the flavor was not mouth watering. To top it off, the employees were not the greatest. It was not up to our cupcake standards. We give it a sprinkles score of 1/2 a sprinkle.

Eleni's had cupcakes, but they looked like the kind in grocery store delis. We decided to instead try the cookies because they looked absolutely beautiful, but they were disappointing. We got some small leaf cookies that looked cute, but were hard to bite into. One was even borderline burnt. We know it's been on the Food Network, but we give this store a sprinkle score of 1.