Tuesday, April 11, 2006


Cupcake Cafe
522 9th Avenue
New York, NY

As one of the top contenders in the ongoing NYC-cupcake-battle, the Cupcake café is best know for its ridiculously dense cakes and rich, colorful, buttercream frosting. Sharing a window display with these buttery marvels, it's easy to see how a baked-good as simple and endearingly humble as a doughnut could get overlooked – but the Nuts at Cupcake are just as impressive as their cakes.

Sunday afternoon: Blognut enters the Cupcake café.

Initially blinded by the rows and rows of brightly buttercreamed cupcakes, it takes us a few minutes to notice the bowl of plain doughnuts sitting in the front window. They only have 3 left. The café specializes in old fashioned plain cake donuts with flavors like buttermilk, pumpkin, whole wheat oat, whole wheat orange, chocolate, and lemon.

For the more adventuresome Nut-eater they also offer a raspberry-filled and a sweet potato-glazed. We order a single buttermilk Nut and grab a table in the corner while customers steadily file in and out. While our purchase looks like any other plain cake doughnut, it turns out to be heavier, weight-wise, than most contemporary Nuts.

Blognut eats it. The Nut's simple external appearance gives way to a rich, complex flavor which greatly surpasses our Nut-Expectations. Slightly sweet and unbelievably dense, this is the perfect Nut for dunking (on our next trip to Cupcake we'll certainly be ordering a coffee). This is by far the most interesting plain cake doughnut we have encountered in New York.

Post-Nut, Blognut wanders over to the Hell's Kitchen Flea Market across the street, and digs through bins of records, piles of dishes, and stacks of picture frames. Serendipitously, Blognut emerges with a prize: a perfectly-preserved, vintage Mister Donut coffee mug.









1 comment:

PauldP said...

You were IN the Cupcake Cafe. IN there!!! You did not have the Sweet Potato Glazed. This is the definition of tragedy.