Sweet Revenge and Other Cupcake Adventures
June 7, 2009
Uh oh, watch out - we’re on a cupcake kick again!
Taste Tester wanted to visit Sweet Revenge ages ago. It took us a while, but we recently gained the motivation to go from this list of New York’s Best Cupcakes by Nancy Olson of Gramery Tavern. Nancy raved about Sweet Revenge’s “The Sweet Revenge” peanut butter cupcake and ranked the cupcakery at an honorable 8th place out of 15 of NYC’s best cupcake stops. Here’s her full run-down of their cupcake collection:
And here’s our critique of “The Sweet Revenge” cupcake:
This cupcake as a whole is better than the sum of it’s parts. The cake didn’t have an intense peanut butter flavor and had a dry consistency, making it easily the weakest component of the cupcake. The frosting on the other hand, had a pleasantly smooth consistency but also lacked intense peanut butter flavor (at least, by our high pb-loving standards). Luckily, when paired together, the two moderately peanutty elements made for a strong overall peanut butter flavor.
When I first bit into it, I thought it was a good cupcake but nothing amazing. Then I got to the creamy dark chocolate ganache center, and WOW. A bite with all three elements was perfect. I understood the hype. Taste Tester did too, noting it as one of his favorite store-bought cupcakes (second to Molly’s in Chicago).
As far as presentation goes, I loved the brown paper wrapping. The wooden fork that came with it was cute, but not particularly pleasant to eat with as the dry wood didn’t do the dry cake any favors.
Here’s a shot of the cross-section. I think you can see by looking at it that the cake was dry but the frosting and ganache were mmm MMM good!
Oh and I can’t forget about the cookies! Before running out to gobble our cupcake, we noticed a cake stand on the counter that was full of Chocolate Chip and Peanut Butter Cookies. I for one, cannot resist a soft cookie. Could you?
These cookies are soft, buttery and doughy. They were so moist that they actually made kind of a squishy sound as I broke them in half. It’s hard to describe the sound without it coming off as gross, but I promise it was a good thing.
Taste Tester and I both agreed that these cookies were not quite as good as the ones from Feed Your Soul, but if you’re a fan of soft cookies, you should absolutely try them. The chocolate chip was slightly better than the peanut butter, but they were both very good.
Oh and FYI, Sweet Revenge is also a bar where they host wine, beer and cupcake pairings. So the next time you’re out late and your friends want to go to a bar when you’re dying for something sweet, you can both be happy!
Taste Tester and I have only tasted 7 of the 15 cupcakes on Gramercy Tavern’s list. Clearly, we have to get working! I’ll keep you posted when (not if) we try any others!
On a partially related note (this is a cupcake post, after all) I attended the Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn this weekend where I had the pleasure of meeting Jessie Oleson of Cakespy, a blog I’ve been a big fan of for a long while. I went home happy with one of her adorable cupcake t-shirts. The shirt’s graphic is a drawing of hipster cupcakes waiting at the Bedford Ave Subway Stop in Williamsburg. It was an all-too appropriate tee for this event. Check out more of Jessie’s super cute cupcake products at her etsy shop!
It should also be mentioned that on the way home from the fair, we stopped at the ever-awesome sweets shop Baked, where I had a fantastically good chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting. I truly cannot get enough cupcakes. But then again, who could?