Sugar Sweet Sunshine (final cupcake showdown!)...

I've gotten in the habit of screening a new restaurant or dish before coming back to write about it. I just dont' like lugging the d-SLR around if I don't need to, complete with gorilla-pod, filter, flash, blahblahblabh. It's mostly b/c I'm a gelatinous pig. HA!! GET IT?? gluttonous, gelatinous, was being off kilter funny. *ahem*. anyway...

The first time I had Sugar Sweet Sunshine was @ Karen's bday when Claudz got her the pistacchio cake. Cakey cake cake...yummmmmm. ANYWAY...

The next time I actually had Sugar Sweet Sunshine was an abysmally long time after...like last month actually, before heading out to some BBQ (memorial day mehbeh?) in Billy-burgh. We got the Ooey Gooey (chocolate cake w/ chocolate almond buttercream), Pumpkin Spice (pumpkin cake w/ cream cheese icing),

...and Sexy Red Velvet (red velvet w/ satin buttercream), and Pistacchio (pistacchio cake w/ satin buttercream aka "the moose"). There was also the Sassy Red velvet--which just had the chocolate almond buttercream instead of the regular ish but that was saved for another day.

BOTTOM LINE: I think SSS is the bestest EVARRRRHHHHH because they color outside the lines a bit with flavor combos and whatnot--PISTACCHIO??? yum. Again, the icing on the pistacchio--the satin buttercream--is reminiscent of yet has a lighter consistency than the Marshmallow Fluff spread and I SWEAR...cannot be plain ol' buttercream but whatebbs.

One more shot of the Ooey Gooey w/ Milk b/c it was pretty :)

ALMOND EXTRACT in the buttercream--this ALSO is brazilliant, regardless of how innocuous almond extract really is. It blows my mind here and there when I haven't used it for a while in my cake b/c I kinda forget how aromatic and strong even a smidge of it is. CRAZY LIKE A FOX!!

Anyhoodle, when I came back to SSS the second time around w/ Julia, I got all the same stuff again and then some. Just a note, I've never found yellow cake to be that appealing--but SSS yellow cake, me likes. I wouldn't necessarily order a yellow cake cupcake over chocolate any given time, but for SSS I'd eat that shizz instead of letting it sit or pass it off to somebody else as I tend to. Yellow cake normally is just incredibly pedestrian to me. PSHHHHH...b*tch please. ;) No seriously, it's a little pedestrian.

Besides the fact that it's located in the Lower East Side in what looks to be a run-down, dirty hipster version of the light-Connecticut-Montauk white and pastel decor found at Billy's or Magnolia's where you might feel like making a patriotic pound cake or short cake topped with whipped cream and strawberries for stripes and blueberries for star emblem, drinking mint lemonade out of a mason jar with straw decoratively tied around the edge in the wicker basket of your bike as you pedal around Hyannisport or Nantucket or some crap....

Sugar Sweet sunshine looks like you're in a fonder memory of the 1960's going into 70's complete with requisite avocado/lime/whatever colors and peeling faded pink, playing in the attic with an E-Z oven while a fudgsicle stick drips down your wee little hands while scratching at your scraped up knees from the day's rowdiness in the sand pit watching the light bulb bake intently, while in the background ur older cousins or brother/sister played vinyls from Van Morrison or Stevie Wonder--hell maybe even the Steve Miller Band and possibly locking you out of the attic so they could try their hands at being mid-day tokers instead.

Or in my case, my brothers locked me in a closet so they wouldn't have to watch me when they sneaked out to play soccer w/ the neighborhood kids. I don't even know what that last imagery was like/came from b/c quite frankly my toddler years were in Vietnam playing on our third floor giant patio and watching this man who rented out some portion of my family's building make chalk. Seriously. Chalk making. pretty cool to watch. :)

But yeah--Sugar Sweet Sunshine in a nutshell: more homey-goodness and explorations into interesting cupcakery beyond that banal tripe of a competition between Magnolia's, Crumb's (bleah), Buttercup (bleaaaaaah), and Billy's--not to mention the kajillian offshoots from Magnolia's spreading in the outer bouroughs and such. PLUS SSS cupcakes are only $1.50 while the others are well above $2--not to mention stupid Sprinkles in CA is dry and I swear left out in the open for a long time and not fresh is close to $4 if memory serves me right. I lost pictures of Sprinkles when I went with Peggy the last time I was home =/ *curse you busted hard drive covered by warranty!* *shakes fist!*

....aaaaand *end scene*.

Magnolia's Bakery (...the Cupcake Showdown preview...)...

...I don't like Magnolia's Bakery.

YEAH THAT'S RIGHT. I DON'T LIKE MAGNOLiA's BAKERY. me no likey--magnolia not numbah 1, magnolia numbah 10! magnolia not a-okay! (shout out to Operation: Dumbo Drop which when I was younger, was very excited about it being filmed in the motherland--not so sure how I feel about it now. will have to inspect).

Let's go over ze Magnolia cupcake's finer points.

Ze cupcakes are moist, perfectly moist, light, not that sweet (on the fence about the flavor of the cake itself). mmm....nummy nummy nummy nummy. We got some red velvet cake. The frosting was bland and lackluster, but the cake was incredibly moist and light as previously mentioned. Please see exhibit 1.

And...zey are also pretty.
Now, what you can't tell, is the consistency in the frosting which is a HUGE factor for me. Billy's uses buttercream, I assume Magnolia does too but more sugary-ness. Magnolia's frosting is *much*MUCH* sweeter, to the point of overbearing/overwhelming/overpowering, all sorts of "over"-ness as in "over it"--points off. Magnolia's frosting is sloppy, and runny.

Okay, so they pretty much look like Billy's Bakery cupcakes (and u can see below that i smudged a finger on that cupcake there, but BACK TO THE POINT).

Mike & I weighed the fact that we got ours freshly swathed right in our faces, but it DID have time to really settle on the train ride back. (Btw, we went to the new opening of the Magnolia's on the UWS on 69th & Columbus where the Penang used to be--oh Penang how i heart you since beantown w/ ur asparagus chicken and mango shrimp. but tha'ts another story...)
CONCLUSION: I don't *hate* Magnolia's, I just wouldn't go there if I had the chance and I definitely would NOT wait in line OR make it a point to take any friends, who are visiting, to go there. It's really the too sweet frosting that kills it. I don't care about how runny the frosting is, it's just I choke on every bite b/c the sugar just hits the back of ur throat like your tonsils got dropkicked with sunshine and carebears (if u like that sort of thing).

So I've had Crumb's, Buttercup, Billy's (^_^), Magnolia's(with an appalling website)--what's left is Sugar Sweet Sunshine in the LES. Will report back with a cumulative assessment. I had a pistachio cake version of the cupcake from SSS at Karen's bday party--I'm excited to finish out the tasting. Here's a fun little story in NYMAG about the whole cupcake lineage in the city.

Billy's might be a little dry but MY GOD the frosting (even the German Chocolate Cake) is SPOT ON.

(...and thus, u can see the diff b/w setting up the shots w/ no flash vs flash and the world of diff it makes. now that i've got my SB800 w/ diffuser, we'll see how that carries, and how the gold bounce might work out too.)