Boston Bakery Crawl - Sweet Bakery and Georgetown Cupcakes

Sweet Cupcakes and Georgetown Cupcake - visited July 10, 2016

After Flour, I hit two cupcakeries on my walk. One was Sweet Bakery which was (almost surprisingly) empty when I walked in. In fact, it looked so deserted, I thought it was closed. But I walked in and someone came in from the back. I wonder if the quiet was due to their location as it wasn’t on a very busy part of Massachusetts Avenue. Their flavors seemed like the typical chocolate, vanilla, red velvet but there were also less typical flavors such as Cappuccino and Root Beer Float.  I myself scored a caramel macchiato cupcake (it was the last one left).

I thought it was pretty delicious. The cupcake was a bit on the small side, similar to the “normal” size that Kara’s Cupcakes does and smaller than Sprinkles. Too much frosting for me but the cupcake itself had a really nice crumb and the perfect moist cakey texture. The flavor wasn’t too strong and I had been hoping for a caramel filling but alas, it was just cupcake with a mound of frosting. I liked the frosting for the flavor but there was just too much of it for this non-frosting person. That’s the downside of cupcakes. With the exception of Sibby’s, almost all of the cupcakeries I’ve tried top the cupcakes with a ton of frosting. Some people love that. Unfortunately I’m not one of them. Still, I thought it was a good cupcake and not at all representative of the empty shop I walked into.

On the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of patronage was Georgetown Cupcake. I went to the one on Newbury Street and there was a small line out the door when I arrived and the shop was full. I had ample time to take pictures of the cupcakes arranged behind the glass cases and make my cupcake selections of Salted Caramel and Vanilla. Normally I get red velvet or chocolate when trying a new place for the first time but I’ve learned to also judge a bakery by its vanilla products. Why? It’s not hard to make a really great chocolate cupcake and most people love chocolate. Vanilla, in my mind, is so simple and sometimes the simple flavors are the hardest to do really well. So I thought I’d test out Georgetown on the vanilla flavor spectrum.

Both cupcakes were good. Once again too much frosting for me but that’s par for the course. I wished for more salted caramel in the salted caramel cupcake as most of it came from the dollop on top of the frosting. This is another case where I wished they had put it in as a filling like Kara’s does. 

The vanilla was also good. I have to confess though – maybe it was because I ate the cupcakes the day after I bought them and not right when I walked out of the shop but I thought they were just good, not spectacular. Given the crowd at the shop, I had expected spectacular. Glad I got to try them though but between Georgetown and Sweet, I’d say the cupcake from Sweet was a tad more moist and more fluffy.