The Start of a (Sweet) Journey

So I got a hankering for cupcakes today. As someone with a sweet tooth as big as mine, this is not so uncommon an occurrence. Since moving to the city in November, I've already been to a few of the plethora of bakeries specializing in cupcakes, so I started looking poking around Google to see what others people have rated highly that I could try out. While surveying my options, I had a thought: wouldn't it be fun to try all of them? Obviously this would be a large undertaking that could take—let's be honest here—years. With the constraints of time, money, and my figure, along with the sheer number of cupcake bakeries in Manhattan alone (not to mention the other boroughs), this is not a project I could complete anytime soon. I certainly won't be eating cupcakes every day. Maybe once a week, but I'm not going to be giving myself a timeline. I'm simply going to rate and review as I go.

As one might infer from my choice of blog titles, I'll be using vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing as a constant. Every bakery has them, and I'm such a fiend for vanilla that vanilla cupcakes are usually my go-to choice at a new bakery, anyways. (I do the same thing with ice cream. I'm terribly boring, I know.)

So there's the project. Start hitting cupcake bakeries. Start eating vanilla cupcakes. Write about my exploits.

I'm mostly looking forward to the cupcakes.

So let's set up some ground rules. What is a great cupcake? A great cupcake is composed of two things: great cake and great icing. Obviously what makes these two elements great is an opinion that will vary from person to person. In my world, the ideal cupcake has cake that is moist, fluffy, and just the slightest bit sweet. The icing can be either light or dense, depending on the type of icing used, and should be a bit sweeter than the cake, but not sweet enough or plenteous enough to overwhelm it. They should work in harmony to create one single serving of dessert bliss. They should complement, not dominate. And thus goes an ideal cupcake.