Cakespy tests Common Ground Coffee & Cupcakes in Renton, WA

Image from Flickr by Naresha of Southern Patrol

Our favorite Cakespy Jessie visited Common Ground Coffee & Cupcakes in Renton, Washington, and had this to say on her Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog:

Common Ground opened earlier this year to some pretty positive reviews. They generally offer about 10 types of cupcakes a day--generally an assortment of standard fare like chocolate and vanilla, with seasonal and special flavors like Chocolate Mint, Espresso, and around this time of year, Pumpkin, alternating on the menu. They're offered in two sizes--regular ($2-$2.50 depending on flavor) and mini ($1.00 ea.). All of the flavors we got were brightly and festively decorated with a puff of frosting; the pumpkin cupcake had a cute pumpkin cream on top. Our three tasters eagerly dug in.

And our thoughts? Well, we've heard it said before of pizza that "even when it's bad, it's still good", and it seems appropriate here as well. To be clear, the cupcakes weren't bad--certainly none of our cupcakes were unfinished at the end of the tasting--but then again, they weren't the best we've tasted. The cake was nice, if a little greasy; the frosting was light and sweet, but rather than the creamy, buttery frosting you might expect in a boutique operation, leaned more toward the taste of whipped frosting you'd expect from the cakes of big commercial bakeries.

Southern Patrol had this to say (and also took the photos in this post, thank you SP!):

They make all of their flavors in both mini-cupcakes and regular-sized, a bit smaller than Cupcake Royale's cupcakes (which is fine by me!) Standard cake flavors are chocolate and vanilla, and their frostings come in a lot of different flavors (chocolate, vanilla, banana strawberry, latte, orange, lemon, caramel, etc). The cupcakes are made throughout the day, so they're fresh even in the late afternoon. They also do special flavors for holidays--they had Red Velvet cupcakes for Mother's Day, for instance.

Personally, I find the frosting to be on the sweet side, though the dark chocolate and latte flavors are a bit less so. It's all good, and the cake's moist and tender as well.