Thing 141: Couture Cupcakes at ACKC

It's Cupcake Madness! Click here for the bracket and the judging sheet. Check out previous contender Red Velvet.

Artfully Chocolate Kingsbury Confections (ACKC) sells local cupcake brand Couture Cupcakes, which are, as the name might imply, rather fancy. So fancy in fact, that we couldn't order a control cupcake (ie, a vanilla cupcake with chocolate icing). Did this set Couture back? Not necessarily. But my team is hard to please, and once again their socks were not knocked off.

This time, absent the control cupcake, we ordered a vanilla cupcake with pink cinnamon icing, a chocolate cupcake with raspberry frosting and two chocolate cupcake/brownies with whipped cream and caramel.

The vanilla and cinnamon one ended up actually being my favorite of the three -- the icing was light and airy, a highly whipped cinnamon-flavored buttercream. The chocolate cake with raspberry struck me as too sweet, and the chocolate brownie one was dense and rich -- delicious, but not a perfect cupcake, more like a good brownie. Also, at $3.65 these were the most expensive cupcakes on our crawl.

Comments from my team include "too sweet, icing was light and delicious," "cinnamon was the worst, they got better," "don't like cinnamon, the chocolate and raspberry was dry," "didn't like choice of flavors, but liked chocolate/caramel," "liked the cinnamon frosting, cake was moist for vanilla," "prefer cake type and icing type," "enjoyed chocolate caramel," and "eh..." These cupcakes scored low on value and size, and earned slightly above average marks for cake and icing.

The overall score was a 3.1 -- 0.6 more than Red Velvet! Couture Cupcakes advances to the Fabulous Four, set to face off with CakeLove...