Nofrodelius and I like to do themed crawls – and usually it’s cupcakes.  But the first year, after eating 8 different cupcakes from 4 different bakeries, we decided we needed to scale back, lest we wanted to die of sugar highs and food coma again. The second year, we were slightly more reasonable, opting for a boozy cupcake testing of just 4 cupcakes from Cupcake Royale – we didn’t quite make it through that either.  Year 3, we tried an ice cream crawl, which had us eating from 3 ice cream shops – that was definitely a mistake. Never eat that much ice cream in a half day – you’ll have brain freeze and a sugar high. We also did a macaron crawl that year, which was probably our most successful attempt with 16 macarons. We hardly ever finish everything we buy when we do the tastings, and we insist on doing all of the tasting at the same time to get the best comparison.

Year 4, we’re back to a cupcake theme, but since I haven’t been to some of these bakeries, I didn’t know if cupcakes were available.  If there were cupcakes, we bought them.  If there weren’t, we tried other things. Now, the magic in this year’s crawl is that all the shops were located within a half mile of each other on 45th on the Wallingford side in Seattle.  We didn’t have to trek all over town for our goodies, got a bit of a walk in, and stopped in at few cute shops along the way (our favorite was Paper Delights – they have the Brause blue pumpkin nib in stock!!!).

We went to Sweet Side – a custom cake bakery, Cubes Baking – a newer bakery where all their items are baked in cubes that focuses on Mexican pastries where you pick up your own pastries with tongs (similar to Chinese bakeries), and finally, Trophy Cupcakes.

Cube’s dulce de leche cupcube – like a dense poundcake in texture, not too sweet and in the shape of a square in fitting with the bakery theme. Good frosting to cake ratio, but not very strong on the dulce de leche flavor.

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