From Seattle Weekly food blog Voracious comes the news that cupcakery Cupcake Royale will now be using 66% local ingredients:
I wasn't a big fan of the plain Cupcake Royale cakes (though I'd stop in for carrot cake and red velvet). But this week I tasted the new version, and found McCown's master recipes much, much better — the vanilla crumb is finer and more delicate and the chocolate cake moister, even after a day sitting out on the counter. But that's not the only change Hall and new head baker Melanie Bonadore have been making behind the scenes.
They've just gone locavore.
"We been watching what's been going on in food, and were keenly aware of the shift toward local food," says Hall. "Melanie's background is at Essential Baking, but before that she worked on a Skagit Valley farm. We've been wanting to buy more stuff locally." These days their boxes are printed in Ballard, the butter and canola oil comes from Washington dairies, but the crucial part of making their cupcakes locally sourced was finding a supplier for Washington wheat.
Even though Washington is one of the nation's top wheat-producing states, switching to local flour isn't just a matter of heading to the store and picking up bags of Stone-Buhr. The more you scale up a baking recipe from, say, a 12-cupcake batch, the more precise you have to be with your measuring and mixing. Cupcakes are especially tricky to measure and mix, says Bonadore, since professional bakers are making hundreds of individual cakes at one time, and if you mix the baking soda in unevenly, for instance, it kills an entire batch.
This photo was posted on their Facebook page by Rachel Benjamin Quercia (via Cupcake Royale on Twitter):
I wasn't a big fan of the plain Cupcake Royale cakes (though I'd stop in for carrot cake and red velvet). But this week I tasted the new version, and found McCown's master recipes much, much better — the vanilla crumb is finer and more delicate and the chocolate cake moister, even after a day sitting out on the counter. But that's not the only change Hall and new head baker Melanie Bonadore have been making behind the scenes.
They've just gone locavore.
"We been watching what's been going on in food, and were keenly aware of the shift toward local food," says Hall. "Melanie's background is at Essential Baking, but before that she worked on a Skagit Valley farm. We've been wanting to buy more stuff locally." These days their boxes are printed in Ballard, the butter and canola oil comes from Washington dairies, but the crucial part of making their cupcakes locally sourced was finding a supplier for Washington wheat.
Even though Washington is one of the nation's top wheat-producing states, switching to local flour isn't just a matter of heading to the store and picking up bags of Stone-Buhr. The more you scale up a baking recipe from, say, a 12-cupcake batch, the more precise you have to be with your measuring and mixing. Cupcakes are especially tricky to measure and mix, says Bonadore, since professional bakers are making hundreds of individual cakes at one time, and if you mix the baking soda in unevenly, for instance, it kills an entire batch.
This photo was posted on their Facebook page by Rachel Benjamin Quercia (via Cupcake Royale on Twitter):
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