Cupcake crawl – we went to Trophy, Yellowleaf, New York Cupcake, and Cupcake Royale to see who had the best cupcakes. We tried a variety of flavors ranging from normal chocolate to off the wall Elvis.

New York cupcake – SOHO Strawberry: the name of a cupcake evokes a summery sophistication, and this one was one of my favorites for a simple cupcake. Just strawberry frosting on an airy chocolate cake – the perfect combination. The strawberry buttercream actually tasted like strawberry, which made for a perfect balance of fruit and luscious chocolate. It may not be inventive, but it is delicious and I would 100%recommend it if you’re on the Eastside.

New York Cupcake – Key Lime: To celebrate summer, they created a key lime cupcake consisting of a lime flavored cake filled and topped with lime buttercream and topped with a lime sugared gummy. it is beautiful, and the frosting core is quite a sight to behold. The cake was airy, moist but held the frosting, giving it a nice balance. It wasn’t too sweet, despite the fact that over half the cake was made of frosting. The lime flavor felt refreshing rather than citrusy and held very well. The lime gummy was a nice touch – not necessary, but part of the magic of cupcakes where decoration is at least 25% of the reason it tastes good. This is a seasonal flavor, available through May.

Trophy Sasquatch – a whiskey meringue fluff with graham cracker topping and crust on the bottom and chocolate cake; I mistakenly called it a s’mores cupcake, but was quickly corrected by the staff. Still, s’mores hold a special place in my heart, so it’s hard not to love this cupcake. It delivers on everything a s’mores cupcake should be, with the bonus of a strong flavor of whiskey in that just cooked meringue top. It was solid on the outside, but soft and pillowy on the inside. The chocolate cake had a medium crumb, but it wasn’t an extremely moist cake, and thankfully not a dry one either. Just a plain old middle of the road chocolate cake I’d say, but it’s the chocolate part of my s’more and it passed that role just fine. I might be biased because I love s’mores, but this was probably my favorite cake out of all the ones we tried. Maybe because it didn’t have frosting, and maybe because it had hints of smoked whiskey in the meringue, and maybe because it was different from all the other cupcakes… Sadly, it was on special and I’m not sure if it’s on the menu anymore, but it was definitely a favorite memory of mine.

Trophy Cupcake – The Elvis: this one a wonder and a treasure to behold. It is exactly as advertised and is not for the faint of heart. You need to like an Elvis sandwich to appreciate the beauty of this cupcake. For context, an Elvis sandwich consists of bananas, peanut butter, and honey. The cake was a banana nut cake with flakes of coconut – it hard a large crumb and again, was on the not moist, but not dry side, much like the s’more. However, this is banana nut bread, and anyone that makes a cupcake out of banana nut bread gets serious kudos for inventiveness in my book. It’s like carrot cake, except banana. Now, the peanut butter frosting – this was not disguised and tasted like a mouth full of butter finger brickle, a sweet peanut butter with only an occasional grain of salt for balance. I believe they used a buttercream frosting and then drizzled it with honey for additional layers of sweetness. This one goes down at the best executed, most inventive cupcake. It is on the rotating menu of flavors, so give it a try if you’re ever at Trophy!

Yellowleaf – pancakes and bacon: I’m not exactly sure where the pancakes came into play for this cupcake, but there was definitely bacon! Firm, salty bits of bacon floating on a tuft of Italian buttercream. The butter cream isn’t very sweet, so it doesn’t balance with the bacon very well, though I wish it had more maple flavor to it. The cake is very moist, medium crumb – not quite yellow cake, but very similar. There is almost as much frosting as there is cake, so this is good for frosting lovers (and probably sacrilege that I had to scape off half of it). This cupcake was voted Seattle’s favorite cupcake – I’m not sure I’d agree, but I’m not sad that I tried it either.

Yellowleaf – Belgium chocolate: (first on the left with the patriotic sprinkles) This would be a chocolate lover’s dream as it has chocolate shavings pressed into the Italian buttercream, giving it a richer flavor than most frostings. The colored sprinkles give the 1.5 inch high ball of frosting a satisfying crunch to break up the tower of cream. The cake was extremely moist, to the point where it almost fell apart from the weight of the frosting if you picked it up incorrectly. I did like the chocolate cake, but again, this was a half frosting half cake cupcake, which I couldn’t handle. The frosting didn’t excite me enough to want to eat all of it, but this is a decent cupcake and good for Italian buttercream lovers.

Cupcake Royale – salted pistachio: a relatively unsweetened frosting with sprinkles of salt and a pistachio nut on a dense white cake. The frosting didn’t have a particular flavor I could identify, but it did have salt in it. The white cake was dense, dry, with a fine crumb, like an over-baked pound cake with less flavor. This one was on the miss list, though their most interesting flavor next to the Maple Bacon.
Cupcake Royale – cream cheese on chocolate: this was supposed to be our standard, the bar that all other cupcakes would be measured by as Cupcake Royale was the first one in Seattle to popularize the cupcake trend with it’s catchy “legalize frostitution” stickers and “random acts of cupcakes”. Their cupcakes, are also at least 30% larger than all other cupcakes and at least 5 times as dense. They also have the lowest frosting to cake ratio, so you’ll be eating mostly cake and not scraping off any of the frosting. The cream cheese frosting is indeed frosting, with a hard layer on the outside and soft cream cheese on the inside – the chocolate curls make for nice decoration but do not add to the flavor. I’d say this is a good starter cupcake, if you’ve never really tried anything else, then this is fine.