Walking on Boylston Street in Boston yesterday I saw a wonderful site: a Kickass Cupcake truck.
I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t it redundant to say a cupcake truck is ‘kickass.’ It’s a truck that serves cupcakes!!” True, but this was a truck owned and operated by Kickass Cupcakes of Somerville.
I saw a woman walking away from the truck, cupcake in hand, and I asked her if Kickass Cupcakes are any good. She laughed and responded, “They’re the best in Boston.”
Well, let me say this: if Kickass Cupcakes are the best Boston has to offer, then Beantown’s cupcake scene is hurting.
I didn’t always care about cupcakes. When the cupcake craze hit New York City I ignored it. Soon after, it arrived in Washington, DC (where I lived at the time) and I rolled my eyes. When a friend told me they wanted to wait in line for over 30 minutes to eat at Georgetown Cupcake I whined the whole time.
The whining stopped that day and forever after when I bit down into my first Georgetown Cupcake – Key Lime. The cream cheese icing blew me away, but so did the soft and moist cake. We ordered a half dozen cupcakes to share and they were all out of this world: Red Velvet, Chocolate Ganache…I can’t remember every flavor we tried but I do know that I loved them all. Everything was rich and full of flavor and seemed to melt in my mouth.
Since then I have tasted many supposedly great cupcakes and only been disappointed. Icings are usually too sugary with no distinct flavor. The actual cake part – roughly 75% of the food, and actually part of its name (!!!) – is almost always bland and dense.
Kickass Cupcakes, however, were different. They had fascinating ingredient combinations. Take the two cupcakes I tried:
Caramel Mochiatto – chocolate cupcake, caramel center and mocha frosting topped with chocolate covered espresso beans took things a step further by piling the toppings high.
S’Mores – graham cracker cupcake with chocolate ganache and a toasted vanilla bean marshmallow
There’s caramel baked into the cake just waiting to ooze out with every bite! I actually pulled a muscle trying to open my cakehole wide enough to eat all the S’Mores ingredients at once.
Unfortunately, the excitement only made the disappointment greater. The “graham cracker cupcake” tasted like a dry piece of cornbread. The “caramel center” was nice but the “mocha frosting” was really just generic sugar icing that there was so much of I hardly tasted the chocolate-covered espresso beans.
This was a life lesson in food eating: Don’t get distracted by ingredients piled high. More is not always better when it comes to food. If that were the case an 18-topping stuffed crust Pizza Hut pie would be the measuring stick by which all pizzas are judged.
So tell me, Boston:
- Are Kickass Cupcakes the best in Boston? If so, tell me which cupcake I need to eat.
- Is there a simple but delicious cupcake to be found elsewhere in Boston?
- Or do cupcakes in Boston just suck and I should give up my search now?
photo by Dinner Series via Flickr
UPDATE: Boston cupcake makers are about to get learned. Georgetown Cupcake is coming to Boston in the Spring, opening a shop on Newbury Street.
Should I go start waiting in line now?
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