photo by James M. Thresher
Georgetown Cupcake's Chocolate Ganache cupcake - Cupcake Wars winner from The Washington Post - see also their recipe
The Washington Post has declared the cupcake pictured above the winner of their Cupcake Wars, which involved weeks of tasting and testing cupcakes. They report that Georgetown Cupcake sells 4,000 cupcakes on Saturdays, and go on to say:
No wonder then that "cupcakeries" continue to open in Washington and around the country. This past summer, Lavender Moon Cupcakery opened in Alexandria and Hello Cupcake debuted in Dupont Circle. And just when it seems the market is saturated, more are on the way. Before the end of the year, Nostalgia Cupcake will open in Annapolis, and Red Velvet Cupcakery, sister to Dupont Circle's TangySweet, will open in Penn Quarter. Online-only Bakeshop DC, which sells at Murky Coffee, plans a storefront in Clarendon. Upstart Cup of Yumm is searching for space in and around Gaithersburg. Sprinkles, the famed Los Angeles cupcake shop, is hunting for space in Northwest Washington, with plans to open late next year.
To be honest, we thought that cupcakes' 15 minutes might well be over when we launched Cupcake Wars, a round-robin showdown of Washington area bakeries. But after receiving hundreds of e-mails and phone calls from bakers and rabid fans, we could see that the trend has life in it yet. We established clear rules to keep things manageable -- all bakers must have a retail storefront presence inside the Beltway -- and extended the battle from six to eight weeks to accommodate a mountain of reader suggestions.
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It wasn't long before we had a bad case of cupcake fever, too. In and out of the tasting room, we debated at length the proper ratio of frosting to cake and how much more quickly a vanilla cake can dry out than a chocolate one. We had a spreadsheet to crunch the numbers on the cupcakes' weights, prices and flavors. In total, in the preliminary rounds alone, we sampled 141 varieties or 31 pounds of cupcakes; that's 7.75 pounds for each regular taster. The amount of weight gained by each taster is considered private.
They've also posted the The 10 Commandments of Cupcakes, as part of a very extensive cupcake package, which we'll link to more later. For now, here's the commandment I liked best:
6. Respect your vanilla extract, and respect your chocolate. Vanilla is a flavor, not a synonym for "white." On the other side of the spectrum, people are very serious about chocolate, so if you promise it, you'd better deliver it, in a big way. A chocolate cupcake that doesn't taste deep, dark and rich is a bitter disappointment.
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