Review: Dozen Cupcakes
Short version: 1) A single cupcake at Dozen(tm) costs $2.50; 2) The Dozen Cupcakes enterprise is vaguely sinister in a Disney-slash-porno way; 3) You can get the same or better cupcake experience by whipping a stick of butter with granulated sugar and eating it with a spoon while looking at the pictures on the Dozen Cupcakes website.
Long version....
I don't think Dozen Cupcakes is a bakery. I think it's a cupcake pornographer. These things are so bloated with frosting they look like cartoons. I've been drooling over their website for weeks, but I suspected that the actual cupcakes were going to be an abomination. How could they not be? If cupcakes were supposed to look that good, they would have looked that good a long time ago.
I finally got over there to try them tonight. It was almost 8pm, but the narrow little storefront was crammed with people who until a couple weeks ago didn't even want a cupcake. The thought of cupcakes hasn't crossed my mind in probably thirty years, but there I was, waiting in line to buy four medium-large cupcakes at $2.50 each. A voice in my head said: Ten dollars for four cupcakes is insane. Waiting in line to buy cupcakes is insane. But they were gorgeous cupcakes. I'll give them that.
I didn't realize it until later, but the Dozen(tm) Cupcakes store doesn't smell like a bakery. There was no homey aroma of cake baking at all. It was late and the elves had probably gone home for the day...but still, shouldn't there be a lingering cake-baking scent? Another thing I realized later: the four cupcakes I bought fit perfectly into their box. So perfectly that it gives me the creeps. Part of the charm of a non-chain bakery is the wax-paper tissue they use to protect your treats in their ill-fitting box. Dozen (tm) claims they're not a chain (I asked the owner), but I've never seen a non-chain bakery fit its goods to its packaging so perfectly. The voice in my head: Something's not right about that.
The four flavors I sampled were chocolate on chocolate, vanilla on vanilla, red velvet, and "cosmo." I shared them in the car with Gwen on the way home, each of us taking a few bites and trading off, saying, "ugh" and "that's nasty," but we still finished about half of each kind. For $2.50, you do get a lot of cupcake. More to the point, you get a lot of frosting. There's so much buttercream on the damned cupcake you can't comfortably take a bite.
Beyond the fact that the cupcake itself is an obstacle to eating it, there are other, more subtle issues of cupcake expectations that Dozen(tm) fails to address. For example, I expect to enjoy both the cake and the frosting. A friend who succumbed earlier in the week had warned me that the cake part of the Dozen(tm)-style cupcake is irrelevant -- this is a frosting-focused enterprise. Still, I expected the cake to taste, oh, I don't know, good. I'm not sure what you have to do to cake to make it support that much frosting, but Dozen(tm) has gone the route of cardboardization. With the exception of the "cosmo", these were the stalest, driest, most flavor-free rounds of cake I've ever spent ten dollars on. I think back to how perfectly the cupcakes fit inside their cardboard box, and the odd absence of cake-baking aroma in the store, and the narrowness of that location, and what I know about the space needed to house a convection oven, and again with the voices in my head...something is not right. I don't think they bake the cake here. I think they buy it from cupcake sweatshops in Mexico.
OK, so it's all about the frosting. That much is clear. Was the frosting experience worth the money I spent on it? No. It was not.
For ten dollars I expect to have my mind shattered by the frosting. I expect to be sobbing when the frosting is gone. But our response to the cliffs of buttercream was "ugh" and "that's nasty." Problem #1: it didn't taste much like frosting. It didn't have that velvety-soft, yielding texture that supports but doesn't overwhelm a flavor. Problem #2: it had the taste and texture of a stick of butter mixed with granular sugar. Granular sugar -- not confectioners sugar. I could feel the grains of sugar in my mouth, mixing weirdly with the butter and other flavors, none of them playing together. If you'd asked me what flavor of cupcake I was eating, I might not have known without checking its color. "Um, it's frosting-flavored." I asked the voice: "Why aren't they using confectioner's sugar, as required by all the known laws of how to make frosting?" And the voice said: "Because confectioner's sugar doesn't have enough structure to support frostings as massive and astonishing as these."
I think there are two reasons we don't often see cupcakes like this outside of cartoons: 1) physics; 2) taste. The sheen and density of butter, combined with the structure of granular sugar, makes a gorgeous-looking frosting that's kind of gross to eat.
I don't think many of Dozen's(tm) customers will notice or care that they're eating shitty cupcakes, because these things are a lifestyle experience, not a food. Frankly, I'm glad they suck -- a dozen cupcakes is the last thing I need.
Long version....
I don't think Dozen Cupcakes is a bakery. I think it's a cupcake pornographer. These things are so bloated with frosting they look like cartoons. I've been drooling over their website for weeks, but I suspected that the actual cupcakes were going to be an abomination. How could they not be? If cupcakes were supposed to look that good, they would have looked that good a long time ago.
I finally got over there to try them tonight. It was almost 8pm, but the narrow little storefront was crammed with people who until a couple weeks ago didn't even want a cupcake. The thought of cupcakes hasn't crossed my mind in probably thirty years, but there I was, waiting in line to buy four medium-large cupcakes at $2.50 each. A voice in my head said: Ten dollars for four cupcakes is insane. Waiting in line to buy cupcakes is insane. But they were gorgeous cupcakes. I'll give them that.
I didn't realize it until later, but the Dozen(tm) Cupcakes store doesn't smell like a bakery. There was no homey aroma of cake baking at all. It was late and the elves had probably gone home for the day...but still, shouldn't there be a lingering cake-baking scent? Another thing I realized later: the four cupcakes I bought fit perfectly into their box. So perfectly that it gives me the creeps. Part of the charm of a non-chain bakery is the wax-paper tissue they use to protect your treats in their ill-fitting box. Dozen (tm) claims they're not a chain (I asked the owner), but I've never seen a non-chain bakery fit its goods to its packaging so perfectly. The voice in my head: Something's not right about that.
The four flavors I sampled were chocolate on chocolate, vanilla on vanilla, red velvet, and "cosmo." I shared them in the car with Gwen on the way home, each of us taking a few bites and trading off, saying, "ugh" and "that's nasty," but we still finished about half of each kind. For $2.50, you do get a lot of cupcake. More to the point, you get a lot of frosting. There's so much buttercream on the damned cupcake you can't comfortably take a bite.
Beyond the fact that the cupcake itself is an obstacle to eating it, there are other, more subtle issues of cupcake expectations that Dozen(tm) fails to address. For example, I expect to enjoy both the cake and the frosting. A friend who succumbed earlier in the week had warned me that the cake part of the Dozen(tm)-style cupcake is irrelevant -- this is a frosting-focused enterprise. Still, I expected the cake to taste, oh, I don't know, good. I'm not sure what you have to do to cake to make it support that much frosting, but Dozen(tm) has gone the route of cardboardization. With the exception of the "cosmo", these were the stalest, driest, most flavor-free rounds of cake I've ever spent ten dollars on. I think back to how perfectly the cupcakes fit inside their cardboard box, and the odd absence of cake-baking aroma in the store, and the narrowness of that location, and what I know about the space needed to house a convection oven, and again with the voices in my head...something is not right. I don't think they bake the cake here. I think they buy it from cupcake sweatshops in Mexico.
OK, so it's all about the frosting. That much is clear. Was the frosting experience worth the money I spent on it? No. It was not.
For ten dollars I expect to have my mind shattered by the frosting. I expect to be sobbing when the frosting is gone. But our response to the cliffs of buttercream was "ugh" and "that's nasty." Problem #1: it didn't taste much like frosting. It didn't have that velvety-soft, yielding texture that supports but doesn't overwhelm a flavor. Problem #2: it had the taste and texture of a stick of butter mixed with granular sugar. Granular sugar -- not confectioners sugar. I could feel the grains of sugar in my mouth, mixing weirdly with the butter and other flavors, none of them playing together. If you'd asked me what flavor of cupcake I was eating, I might not have known without checking its color. "Um, it's frosting-flavored." I asked the voice: "Why aren't they using confectioner's sugar, as required by all the known laws of how to make frosting?" And the voice said: "Because confectioner's sugar doesn't have enough structure to support frostings as massive and astonishing as these."
I think there are two reasons we don't often see cupcakes like this outside of cartoons: 1) physics; 2) taste. The sheen and density of butter, combined with the structure of granular sugar, makes a gorgeous-looking frosting that's kind of gross to eat.
I don't think many of Dozen's(tm) customers will notice or care that they're eating shitty cupcakes, because these things are a lifestyle experience, not a food. Frankly, I'm glad they suck -- a dozen cupcakes is the last thing I need.