reviews | Oh Honestly, Erin

Aloha Cupcakes and a Gloopy Pie

Aug 262010

The department where I work had a beach party yesterday. It was several weeks in the planning and a food sign-up sheet was quickly filling up. When shit like this happens, I panic. Let’s get real here: I don’t cook. I don’t bake. I don’t even decorate, so helping with party aesthetics was out, as well. I’m still the newbie at this place, and I was certainly not going to bring something store bought. I wanted to impress these people.

So it became Henry’s cross to bear. Barb kept asking, “So what’s Henry making? Has he decided yet?” which only made me more nervous. Not only had he not decided on anything, but he chose to ignore all of my texts and emails which featured angry and frantic houndings.

Game time decision: creamy zucchini pie. I was hoping he would go for something savory, like a summery casserole of sorts, but beggars can’t be choosers. Especially when the beggar has no place in the kitchen.

He was up until nearly midnight the night before, pacing in the kitchen and pulling a variety of anxious and concerned faces.

“What’s wrong?” I asked with trepidation.

“It’s this fucking pie; it’s taking so long to bake and I don’t know why,” Henry muttered, squinting at the recipe. He’s made this pie before and it’s always been so delicious, so I don’t know what the problem was exactly. A new recipe? Don’t ask me. I’m just the eater.

The next day, I started to panic. I needed to have something to take with me to the party. I had already wrote “A PIE” on the sign up sheet, and I was convinced bringing in something contrary to that would be akin to ripping the Do Not Remove tag off a mattress.

Even Manuel was worried, so he called Henry for me.

Henry wound up stopping at one of the disgusting Brookline bakeries and bringing home some sort of almond torte, but I decided I’d rather risk it with the zucchini pie. When I brought it into work, I set it down on the table with a Post-It explaining that it was a zucchini pie, and if it sucked it wasn’t my fault.

Barb got a slice and sat down behind me. Then promptly gagged. I whirled around in my seat and she bust into laughter. “I’m just kidding! I didn’t even try it yet.”

In the end, it would up being OK, I guess, considering Barb ate two slices. I emailed Henry and told him she liked it, but made the mistake of also telling him she jokingly gagged, which he fixated on all night. It sort of turned into a Thing after that. Wendy ate a slice in front of me to assuage my doubts. “It’s good! It sort of tastes like pumpkin pie. Seriously, tell him he did a good job.”

I told him but he was still acting all anally-violated.

One of the processors read the note and said, “That’s not very good advertising for your product!” Well, it’s not MY product, so I didn’t really give a fuck at that point. Later, the same processor asked me if I had tried my crappy pie yet and I very indignantly reminded him that I didn’t make it.

I did eventually try a piece. It was fine! A bit gloopy, which I shouldn’t have told Henry, but I did and he was all Type-A over that. “It’s because it didn’t cook long enough! I can’t understand it!” I was afraid he was going to Plath himself.

Not to be a dick to Henry, but no one really cared about the wide array of pastries, pies, and cakes when Kaitlin’s cupcakes were on center stage. I mean, it’s KAITLIN’S CUPCAKES. Granted, I had never had one of her cupcakes before, but I’ve had her macarons, sugar cookies, snickerdoodles, and oh my god have I had her pumpkin muffins with flax seed. I’m a flax hoe so you know I showed that muffin a good fucking time.

Thank God Kaitlin had the foresight to save me a cupcake because there were none left when I got there at 4:00. While I could only imagine how delicious the cupcake tasted, its veneer was so adorably detailed that I vowed to abstain from devouring it until I took it home to photograph.

That’s five hours sharing a desk with the frosted version of Eve’s fucking apple. Five fucking hours, hearing a veritable clock ticking slowly inside my head.

G and her sagging breasts popped over to say goodnight around 8:30.

Spying my cupcake, she nodded at it and said, “You’re not eating that pineapple cupcake? I’ll have it.”

First of all, I didn’t know it was pineapple, but thanks for killing the suspense, you dumb flashing bitch.

Second of all, step the fuck off my baked goods.

“Oh, I’m going to eat it alright. I’m just saving it so I can take pictures of it first.”

“Pictures?” she echoed in her patented condescending drawl. She even exaggeratedly cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Yeah,” I started, with my own nasty brand of condescention. “I told Kaitlin I would take some pictures since it’s so cute.” I don’t even make eye contact with this woman anymore. I just don’t have the energy to pretend to care about anything she has to say.

“I swiped two,” she giddily shared. “Gave one to my friend who was outside on her smoke break. I figure, share the wealth, right?”

WRONG. What a fucking bitch. No wonder there were none left when I got there. She probably had an entire bakers dozen wedged down into her cavernous cleavage.

Whatever. All I can say is: WORTH THE WAIT.

The frosting was dusted with finely crushed gram crackers. It was amazing. I don’t even know what else to say about it, but it was the best homemade cupcake I’ve had in recent memory. I’m an avid cupcake indulger, but extremely picky as well. This was the perfect balance of light, non-granulated frosting; I hate that thick over-sugared frosting that winds up hardening into a crunchy hardhat. It takes away the cupcake’s delicacy and turns it into something that belongs in a construction worker’s lunch pail. Or lodged in Miley Cyrus’s throat.

Separating the frosting and the cake was a layer of some sort of pineapple custard stuff. Look, my palate is retarded. It would make Gordon Ramsay’s dick shrivel in astonishment. All I know is that whatever it was, it was surprising and creamy, but not in the “Fuck, I just put my face down on this ejaculate-coated pillow” sense.

To summarize: it was a damn good cupcake. The only downside is that I had to share it with Chooch.

If you need me, I’ll just be in my room, designing logos for Kaitlin’s bakery.

Apparently, Macaroons are my Faves

Food, reviews

May 252010

One of my co-workers is the antithesis of me. Her name is Kaitlin, and she’s really good at baking. The downside to working in the evening is that usually by the time I get there, everything she’s brought in for the office has already been devoured, so I’ll have to sit there and listen to everyone’s verbal orgies about the lingering tastes in their mouths from Kaitlin’s delicately baked cookies.

As a self-proclaimed expert on the tastes of baked goods, keeping a polite smile on my face is hard when all I really want to do is start skulking around for crumbs.

But yesterday Kaitlin and Barb were thoughtful enough to make a little sample plate for me and stow it away in the fridge. It even said “Treats for Night Train” on it so no one would try and steal it. I’d have felt better if they booby-trapped it, or hired a ninja to crouch all spider-like against the ceiling in the kitchen, but if you’re confident a flimsy strip of Scotch tape is enough, then whatever.

“They’re macaroons,” Barb informed me before leaving for the day. I was a little let down. I was hoping for something more amazing, like something that maybe Lady Gaga could be found dunking in a delicate cup of Earl Grey with the Queen. (Something not from a sex toy line. We’ll save that for Sunday.) Something ritzy. Something exotic. Something made with lavender because I am still on a lavender kick and keep trying to convince Henry to put it in everything. (Lavender, not his dick.)

When I think of macaroons, I think of my Sunday school teacher wearing a shawl, surrounded by eighteen cats. (What? You don’t still think of your Sunday school teacher? You’re weird.) I think of hard coconut things. I think of your grandma’s wake.

I decided that I was going to just wait and take the plate home with me. Kaitlin has been saying that she wants to learn to take photos of her food and I was like, “OK! Just let me learn how to do that first. Then I will try to act like I know what I’m doing and teach you.” Originally, she was going to teach me to bake in exchange, but I think I would rather her do all the baking herself. Ovens don’t agree with me.

There I was, sitting at my desk, trying to get my work done, when two of the analysts decided to stop right next to me and gush about the macaroons. Now, these were two guys and not some blue-permed Eloise and Matilda wearing puffy-painted cat sweatshirts and fanny packs.

“Oh my god, did you try the coffee one?” the one asked the other.

“No, but I had a raspberry one and it was so fucking amazing,” the other answered back. There are raspberry ones? I thought. I like raspberry things.

“I expected them to be hard like rocks, but then I bit into it and it was the perfect crisp, AND SHE MADE THOSE HERSELF!” the first one exclaimed incredulously, like this was the dessert version of Jesus Christ, getting Nazareth all up in arms. Let me remind you that they were right next to my desk, getting their bakery ejaculation all over my stapler. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were taunting me, trying to get me to cave and eat through the refrigerator door for my own set-aside allotment of macaroons.

Later in the night, one of the processors stopped by with two of them on a napkin (macaroons, not guys talking about them). “Special delivery for you!” she smiled. “I wanted you to get to have some before they’re all gone!” I examined the two round cookies as she placed them in my hand. “There’s a lemon and a chocolate,” she pointed out. “Sorry, I ate the last raspberry one! It was too good to save!”

I was about to mention that Barb had set aside a plate for me in the fridge, but now that these macaroons were eight inches from my face, I forgot all about honesty and was overwhelmed by glutton.

When she walked away, I tapped one. The shell felt hard, but its answer to my tapping was hollow. I took a small bite of the lemon one. The shell broke away crisply just like the one guy had said, but inside it was moist, cakey. The filling between the two domes was light and lemony, which is a good thing since it was a lemon macaroon. I actually murmured (MURMURED!), “Oh my god.” The only other time this has happened was the first time I tried a cupcake from Vanilla Pastry Studio. The stack of conflict checks on my desk eschewed, I began thinking about putting Kaitlin and the Sugar Fairy into a ring and have them bake-off for my love.

I quickly placed the macaroon back down on my desk. This was clearly not the sort of delicacy you pop in your mouth and ingest in one bite, like some fucking mini Chips Ahoy.

Then I picked it back up. I looked at its innards real close and marveled that someone I know in real life could make something so fragile in her own kitchen, as opposed to being made by a magic French baker from 1874 with an oven heated by elves fanning burning coal. And of course I use “magic” as a codeword for “Satanic.”

Try to imagine back to that time a fairy gave birth atop your tongue to pure bliss and a sack of crack-coated laundered money, how happy and rich you felt with minimal cleanup.

Now you know what it was like to eat one of Kaitlin’s macaroons. Happy and rich, obviously, since I have to spell it out for everyone, everywhere, all the time.

Happy and rich. Like I should have been wearing pantaloons and drawing a mole on my face while waiting for my turn under the guillotine. Who cares about death when there are MACAROONS.

Clearly, whatever I originally thought was a macaroon is not a real macaroon. I’m also pretty sure what I thought was a macaroon came packaged in cellophane from the grocery store and was made with cheap ingredients that even paupers would scoff at. (I’m also an expert on things paupers scoff at, as I’m dating one.)

As my taste buds panted in the afterglow, I began firing off a flurry of customary emails to Henry, informing him that he needs to learn to make macaroons because it’s the only thing I’ll be eating from now on.

Do you know how painful it was not to eat the entire fucking napkin afterward, like a goddamn goat?

And to come home with the plate Barb had left for me, only to spend another half hour setting up the lighting and fucking with the camera settings to get a photo for Kaitlin, when all I wanted to do was forcefully masticate the shit out of those little pastel bitches? In the end, I didn’t even care how the photos turned out. Chooch and I were too busy wading in saliva.

I think Kaitlin’s ‘roons* have rendered me retarded. The only thing I can say about the raspberry one is that I’d give up sex for life if someone promised me one of those a day. There was a REAL RASPBERRY IN THE MIDDLE! I was totally not expecting that and I really almost died.

I have big plans for Kaitlin. She just doesn’t know it yet.

*This is what we experts call macaroons. Also, I am so much of an expert, that I didn’t even realize I was supposed to be calling them “macarons.” I win at French stuff.

Cleveland Part 1: The Chocolate Bar

Food, reviews, travel

Feb 232010

There is no reason why a 2-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Cleveland should take nearly 4 hours, yet that is how long it took Alisha and me to get there on Saturday. I blame Henry and his propensity for printing out defective directions. Granted, we did a lot of dawdling, but Henry doesn’t need to know that.

I didn’t get kidnapped by a trucker at the rest stop, but I didn’t have a bathroom issue, as usual. First, as soon as I shut the stall door, the automatic flush was triggered and I’m not sure why, perhaps I was over-caffeinated, but the rush of water as it was being sucked into the bowl made me yelp. Yes, yelp. Not one of my finer moments. Then, the stall door started to drift open and I didn’t have my pants all the way up yet. Public rest rooms are my enemy. I’m certain that one of them will be the scene of my future murder. (Bathroom 1, Erin 0.)

It was a little after 4:00pm by the time we parked in the garage across from the House of Blues. Doors didn’t open until 6:00pm, so we decided to check out the Chocolate Bar that was right across the street. A quick once over of the menu posted by the door was all it took to convince us we might die if we didn’t enter the door, however I might have changed my mind had I been privy to the fact that their website intro actually says “What happens at The Chocolate Bar stays at The Chocolate Bar.” Oh really?

Someone needs to call the fucking Mafia and have them bury that slogan next to Miley Cyrus’s body in the desert. (What, she’s not there yet? Patience, my friends.) And there will be no pouring of the 40s, no ironic “What happens in the desert…”s slung around for old time’s sake. Bury it dead, please.

“I can’t believe this place is attached to the hotel Christina and I stayed in last October and we didn’t even know it,” I irrationally lamented, upset that I missed out on something I didn’t even know existed.

“Yeah, but if you had come here with her, she’d have thought it was a date,” Alisha pointed out. I looked around and noticed that the ambiance was definitely dimmer-switched and candlelit, with edible underwear for sale in a corner nook.

She is wise, so wise.

We had a very perky blond waitress whose name I didn’t care to remember, but she complimented me on my rings and that’s the most important thing to me. I ordered a flight of mousses and Alisha got a platter of strawberries accompanied by a martini glass full of melted chocolate. My teeth got all sprung just looking at it, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to swipe it from under her nose and chug the whole motherfucking glass.

This “incredible sample” of dessert mousses included double chocolate, creme caramel, cappuccino chocolate and lemon ginger; the tray was finished with halved strawberries lying quite sexily atop rose petals. I tore into the creme caramel first and it was actually pretty amazing; it was hard not to swipe at the caramel residue with my finger toward the end when my spoon exhausted its welcome. The double chocolate was topped with white chocolate curls that were definitely not shaven from one of those pink-eyed albino candy rabbits that no one ever wants to see in their Easter basket, but more likely from the wings of angels, fresh from a celestial orgy.

Did I mention my presentation included rose petals? Well, it did. Alisha’s didn’t. She tried to act like she didn’t care, like her vat of molten chocolate made up for the petal-less platter, but I kept seeing her ogling my petals and I felt, as usual, so very triumphant.

The lemon ginger mousse was a pretty large let down. Whatever the hell that white stuff was on the top tasted synthetic, like frothy plastic, or ejaculate if it had been whipped like egg whites. The lemon was too potent and overpowered what trace notes of ginger even existed. I was disappointed with it and am now determined to get Henry to make his own (ejaculate-less) version.

By the time I got to the cappuccino cup, I was on the verge of choco-nausea. I think it tasted great, and I was mad at myself that I wasted the remainder of my sugar tolerance on that ginger shit when I could have been savoring some cappuccino mousse crap.

Alisha must have some strong-ass will power for not slurping that drinking chocolate once she ran out of strawberries. Actually, I don’t think she even ate all of the strawberries. What a crybaby. Anyway, her dessert must have been good because she was relatively nice to me during the length of our stay.

I later looked up The Chocolate Bar on Yelp and most of the reviews were beyond negative. I mean, yeah, the spoon in my setting had been previously used, but who doesn’t like experiencing someone else’s final bite once your saliva moistens it from its crusted cocoon? And apparently, there is big beef in Cleveland with the waitstaff of this eatery. I mentioned this to Henry and he pointed out that I was taking the word of the inhabitants of America’s most depressed city. Touche.

However, too many choices remain on the menu for me to not want to give it a second shot.

Afterward, I tripped when I failed to realize that the bathroom floor sloped upward. (Bathroom: 2, Erin, 0.)

Sprinkles came to my house

Fire in the Kitchen!, Food, reviews

Jul 282009

Last week, I opened my front door to find a gigantic box from Williams-Sonoma perched at my step. First I panicked, because I knew I hadn’t consciously ordered anything from there and my grandma went through this phase where she was ordering shit from QVC in her sleep and what if that was happening to me now too? All of my family’s best idiosyncrasies, consistently delivered to me on the conveyor belt of heritage.

After hauling it inside, I was overjoyed to find, swimming near the top of the inflatable padding, a card that learned me it was an early birthday present from my friend Alyson. Two boxes were beneath all that, wrapped in pretty pineapple paper. THIS IS THE PART WHERE I LEARNED ALYSON BOUGHT ME TWO CANISTERS OF SPRINKLES CUPCAKE MIX WTF OMG!

(My tutu was still downstairs from the Blogathon bullshit, so I put it to work. It needs to earn its keep somehow.)

Seriously, what a fabulous gift for a cupcake snob the likes of myself. In the enclosed card, she specified that perhaps Henry could bake those fine ass bitches up during Blogathon and I thought, “Why, what a swell idea! Something delicious to feast upon while beating myself stupid in the name of charity, and also – fodder to blog about!”

Henry was gone most of the day last Saturday, partially under the guise of “doing me a favor” by keeping Chooch out of my hair, but I’m sure it was mostly because Henry is scared to be around me during Blogathon. And also because I had a ton of pictures I needed him to pose for and he wanted to prolong the inevitable for as long as possible.

When he WAS home, I hounded him. “What about the cupcakes? How about those cupcakes? It’s cupcake o’clock, you motherfucker, let’s go before I blow up your asshole with a stick of dynamite.” And each time, he would say those words that every child and Erin HATE: “In a little while.”

And then it was midnight and he was standing before me giving me some lame ass excuse about not having any butter in the house and Blake was all, “I’ll go down the street to the gas station—” at which point Henry made a threatening throat-slicing motion.

Perhaps he felt bad that I only slept for 4 hours after being up for 24, and I even weed-wacked that afternoon (can you IMAGINE), because the next day he actually made the vanilla batch without any whining and begging from me.

Of Sprinkles, I will say this:

The cake part was very MOIST (why do people hate that word? I love it. In fact, I’ve often considered it tattooed inside my lip) and sweet. I think Henry might have baked it too long because he is not as delightful with baked goods as he’d like The Internet to believe (he’s a really great cook though, I can’t deny that), and the edges were a bit crisp.
Henry does, however, make a bitchin’ frosting. But he wanted to try the recipe that Sprinkles provided, which was very delicious but entirely too sweet for more than a few finger-sweeps while it was still in the mixing bowl. It ended up, in my opinion, being too much once it was sexin’ the cupcake and my teeth screamed a little.
The signature candy bulls eye toppers they supply have no taste and I really wanted them to spark in my mouth like Necco wafers are supposed to but never did when I tried. I learned that when I was in elementary school, from one of the issues of Weekly Reader. I also learned that if one is unable to brush their teeth, eating a piece of cheese before bed is an adequate substitute. That’s why I always guiltlessly devour cheese before bed, even though I know I’ll be brushing my teeth. That is also why I’m 569 pounds. That is also why sometimes a cube of Monterrey jack dislodges itself from my chin rolls the next day and I think, “Shucks, where’d that come from?”
My opinion will not be cemented until I try the red velvet canister (because that shit is the best ever, I mean who came up with red velvet? Some poor bitch, that’s who. Some poor serf-bitch who entered a fief-wide contest, vassals ineligible, to win an opportunity to bake the Queen’s pre-beheading cake and THAT is what she came up with over top her kettle with all the rats scurrying around and nipping at her gangrened toes, and immediately she named it after the fabric from which she pretended her burlap nightdress was made, and seeing as it was the only entry that didn’t cause a palace-wide botulism outbreak, she won) and then also visit one of the bakeries in person and even then, my ultimate opinion will be based on whether or not I see Katie Holmes gormandizing one with my own two eyes. I think I will also ask to shadow the bakers because I’m still not entirely convinced that Tom Cruise isn’t using Sprinkles as a front to contaminate the world with batter-planted religious Rufies.
I will also need to try every flavor they make available to me. And that better be a wide selection, because don’t they know I’ll be slandering the shit out of them if I’m unhappy?
Please come to Pittsburgh. I have a feeling I might really want to have sex with you if we meet in person.

Henry went to bed before the cupcakes cooled, so I was in charge of the frosting station. Of course, I didn’t wait long enough and then bitched when all the frosting shifted around the head of the cake and then began to run down the sides like a souvenir from sloppy sex. What? I didn’t bash in the left side of it from groping it with my heavy beast-hands! It came like that.

THANK YOU, ALYSON! For remembering my birthday, and being such an awesome friend. <3

When Cupcakes Surpass Expectations: A Positive Review

Food, reviews

Feb 102009

I have a confession, something I’ve been holding out on: I succeeded in finding good cupcakes in Pittsburgh and I have known about them now since Sunday. But I didn’t want to go forth and hold a circle jerk in their honor until I tried them again. And again. And once more.

The nirvana in a cup of which I speak so lovingly comes from a small bakery called Vanilla Pastry Studio. I had heard about this place before, but since its write-ups didn’t come attached with a veritable circus of exaggerated superlatives and a carnival of overrated kudos like Dozen and CoCo’s, I never gave it much consideration. Yes, I admit that I allow my intrigue to be tickled by clever cupcake names, marketing panache and hipster-pandering hype. And I admit that even though we had driven past Vanilla Pastry Studio last week, I still decided to patronize CoCo’s because I had heard so much about them. And look at where that got me.

And so on Sunday, I played the “Oh my god, I am basically perching on the ledge of suicide and nothing will buffet my topple better than a fluffy cupcake, oh please Henry, splurge for me.” (Splurge, not splooge. That’s all in my other blog.)

When Henry got back in the car, he didn’t seem very confident. “What is with cupcakes and pretension?” he grumbled. And then I began tirading about that topic the whole drive home, scoffing at how something so simple as a cupcake now has such an hoity-toity air wrapped around it, and then we got in the house and I swiped a finger across the top of a vanilla bean cupcake with caramel frosting and—-

“Oh my sweet, tender Jesus Christ curing a pack of lepers,” I whispered as the frosting literally melted away into an essense of pure delight and world peace upon my once-angry tongue. The texture itself was unlike anything that has ever crossed paths with my mouth, and it created a sensation that can only be described as taste buds fornicating with each other to a master mix of Sade upon a King-sized bed coated with the satine finish of this buttercream frosting. It was sexual. I don’t care; if a kid asks me how it was, I will tell them too. THAT FROSTING IS GODDAMN SEXUAL.

Mothers should be swaddling their babies in this stuff. I am also willing to bet that the cure for cancer lives somewhere in that recipe.

It was like a mouthful of whipped magic. It made me feel safe and comfortable, like Mister Roger’s sweater was carmelized and ground into the granules of pure sugar, and then rammed into my mouth. I will have to write my own dictionary in order to properly review the wonderment that is Vanilla Pastry Studio frosting.

And the cupcake itself — MOIST. Delicate. Classic. Not a choking hazard. It was sweet and fluffy and light as air, and actually tasted like it was made by a 1950′s-era grandmother. It was a Spartan and perfect complement to its piquant pate glaze, secure enough in its simplicity to take a step back and let its topping take the spotlight.

“Now I know what they serve God on his birthday,” I moaned to Henry. Speaking of, even Henry was on board.

“And! They were twenty-five cents cheaper than CoCo’s!” he said smugly. Bigger, too!

Today, he brought home another caramel, plus a mocha, coconut and chocolate. Yesterday, I worked out twice to prepare for this. Chooch and I stood at the front door, chanting “We want cupcakes, give us cupcakes” until Henry pulled into the driveway. He wasn’t even in the house yet and I had near-mauled the bakery box out of his hands and dashed into the kitchen. (I don’t know why I took it off him, considering I had to wait for him to come in and divvy them up, since I don’t know how to cut anything other than skin.)

Sucking the frosting off a piece of chocolate treasure, I couldn’t stop giggling. Henry tossed an annoyed glance at me, and I laughed, “I can’t help it. They make me happy!” and then I giggled some more. If these cupcakes make this girl happy, imagine what they could do for you. For Iran, even!

If I ever get married, I want to eat these off of hot naked people at my bachelorette party.

I am bellyaching and completely stewing in gluttony right now, but holy shit these are fantastic cupcakes. I want to devote my life to promoting this shop.

And on the website, the owner of the bakery calls herself a Sugar Fairy. Now, typically something like that might tend to disrupt my temper, but April Gruver deserves this title. She is a hero in this quality cupcake-deprived city. She may call herself a Sugar Fairy, but I call her a Sugar Messiah. And then when I gain twenty pounds in the next two months, I will call her a bitch.

Cupcakes: An Honest Review

Food, reviews

Feb 032009

Sunday afternoon, we decided to try a semi-new cupcake specialty shop called CoCo’s. Now, keeping in mind that I reside in Pittsburgh (which, for those of you who are unaware, is not exactly a mecca for cupcake couture), I did not hold my hopes so high and loose that they’d soar away through the atmosphere, taking with them a little part of my heart and childlike wonder. Rather, I kept them ground level, tied to a fire hydrant. Because again, this is Pittsburgh. We have tried our illustrious city’s other OMG-Look-We-Bake-Gourmet-Cups-Of-Cake called Dozen two or three times, and while their selection of frosting is creative and worth the inflation, the cake part is always dry and reminiscent of a school cafeteria dessert tray at 3pm. The last time Henry brought some home, one went missing; I later found it moonlighting as a saliva sucker at a dentist’s office. But their cupcakes are well-portioned. Dry, but bigger than your dominatrix’s fist!

“Maybe CoCo’s will be better,” I hoped, urging Henry not to give up after he made the twenty-eighth wrong turn (Professional Driver, who now?). When Henry frowned beneath his bristing ‘stache, I added, “The website says that they use FINE INGREDIENTS.” But really, I knew deep down that this here CoCo would have had to swim across to the Amazon and pluck vanilla beans from the one and only Jack’s stalk and then have Jesus Christ bleed out in her sack of cocoa for it to mean much to Henry.

After road raging upon a poor old man from Wisconsin (you’d be a bad driver too if you had a cheese curd trampoline sealing your anus), Henry found a parking spot. I stayed in the car with Chooch, who chanted, “Cupcake. Cupcake. Cupcake. Pee asshole cupcake? Mommy asshole cupcake? What song is this?” over and over. Several minutes later, Henry was plopping a non-descript paper bag in my lap and growled, “There’s $10 worth of cupcakes.”

I peered inside the bag and at first saw nothing. Then, after some efficient maneuvering of tissue paper, I saw them. Four tiny pucks of ganache. I pulled one out. It felt dense and I was angry that the ganache ran over the paper cup. Mama doesn’t like messes. Immediately, my fingers were attacked by melting chocolate and I began sweating.

Chooch and I took a bite simultaneously. Now, Chooch’s barely three-years-old palate is about as refined as that of an ass-licking dog; he eats food off the floor. So when he breathed, “Oh, it’s so good!” and, in tandem, I said, “Um, ew,” Henry took my word over Chooch’s. And then Chooch promptly started choking because these sons of bitches were drier than a nun’s snatch. You know how sometimes you’re eating corn bread, maybe it’s a day old, maybe you got it out of the dumpster behind that Mexican restaurant, because look, the economy is affecting us all, OK??? And now say you’re eating this cornbread like it’s fucking Manna from heaven and you just survived the motherfucking Apocalypse. You are eating the FUCK out of this shitty, rock-hard, stale as shit corn bread and then, uh-oh, you’re choking like the first time you drank up that trannie’s bitter sex jam.

Then now you know what it’s like to eat a CoCo’s cupcake. And believe me, you would be begging for a Dixie cup of that sex jam to wash it down.

NOW! To be fair, because I always like to be fair, perhaps they were getting ready to close and Henry bought the last four cupcakes that would generally be used as pigeon chow, hobo deterrent, mother-in-law killing devices. Maybe they were too caught up in their collective “Holy Shit, Superbowl!!” fingerbanging session that they left the cupcakes in the oven too long. I do not know. But I can tell you that there was no difference in my very scientific moisture-reading in the vanilla as opposed to the chocolate.

The ganache? It was decent. The little fondant shape thingie that was plopped atop each crown like a Crayola-happy turd? Probably that was meant to be a sweet touch. It made me think of Play-Doh.

Here is Henry’s review:

“What the hell? It’s like, sucking all the saliva out of my mouth. Oh fuck, is Chooch choking? Oh shit, I’M choking! This chocolate one tastes like the other ones — yucky.” [I just included that because I don't thnk Henry has ever said "yucky" before.] “Wait, I know what these taste like. Stale Tasty Cakes! These are nothing more than overpriced, out of date Tasty Cakes.” But without all the fluffy white, processed guts. You know, the best part.

And from there, he was on a warpath, a warpath lined with delicate cups of cake and dollops of fluffy frosting made by angel kisses and vintage porn. “I’m sorry, but I can’t believe this place is succeeding. You know what? I’m going to bake my own cupcakes and I’ll only charge $2.00 for them. $2.50 for these dry-ass cupcakes…” and he mumbled like that the whole way home, in that strange recipe-speak that I never did quite understand but I imagine it’s how Alton Brown and Bobby Flay talk during poker games.

I want him to call his cupcake shack Hank’s Dirty ManCakes. We’ll make it look like a miniature truck stop, and each cupcake will have bushy moustaches and be named after ’70s porn stars. And then on Sundays he will serve soup as well, so I can finally have my fucking souperie.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue my search for the best cupcake in the universe. If I was iCarly, I would give a shout out on my webcast and all my little teenage viewers would fucking trip over themselves to send me boxes of their local favorites. And then perhaps someone would even send me a smorgasbord of those famous Sprinkles cupcakes, at which point I will understand how Katie Holmes finds the will to stay married to Tom Cruise. But I am not a Nickelodeon teen sensation, so I must seek other means. Such as, bundling Janna in a parka and sending her off through the tundra to bring me samples herself. I will even give her a little water bottle.

Oh boy, what should I review next.