microREVIEW: Trader Joe's Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake Mix

Too sweet. I can rarely ever finish a small piece. The crumb topping is almost entirely sugar, doesn't crumb very well, and overwhelms the rest of the cake. It has what seems like a pumpkin aftertaste. Easy to make.

Rating: NEUTRAL

Starbucks' Mini Cupcake

I had one of Starbucks' mini cupcakes. It was pretty good. Still too heavy on the icing, but I'm getting used to that from mass-market cupcakes. It's better than anything I've ever had from a supermarket, so that's something, but at $1.50 for one, $2.50 for two, it's a little pricy. The whoopie pie isn't terribly good, the brownie was decent, and the cake "popsicles" are just stupid ideas, even if they taste alright.

About Last Night.

That giant cupcake's story does not end. When I said I ate it, I didn't really eat it. I was, I guess you could say, in the process of eating it, but I never finished that process.

It was just so bloody huge. Cupcakes are small because they're simple. The mouth just gets tired of a massive slab of uninterrupted cake. Cake and icing does not a dessert make. I ate some, put it down on my bar. Ate some more an hour later. Went to sleep. Woke up, ate some more. After two days, the entire cupcake was still not gone. I eventually threw out the last bit.

So yeah. There's a reason giant cupcakes are not very common. They just don't work very well.

The Problem With Cupcakes.

Alton Brown once said in his episode about cupcakes, that they are not "simply a delivery device for frosting." I was so glad to hear that. I really dislike buying cupcakes from bakeries, even the good ones, since they seem to insist on an equal volume of cupcake to frosting. It's insane. Seriously people, tone down the sweet tooth.


Just look at this bastard from Greggs. It's a good cupcake. But lordie, look at all that icing. It's one of their monster cupcakes, and its sheer size isn't very well communicated in this picture, but their big cupcakes are more than twice as big as your average cupcake. Three times is probably a good estimate. It is well over a cup of icing. After I took this photo, I scraped off more than half of the super-sweet swill before eating the cake... which was good. I'm very happy I ate it.

Now I'll probably get ants in my garbage.

Here's the Good Eats episode.