I like The Oinkster, but Auntie Em's has got them beat. They have the best Red Velvet cupcakes in town and they have little mini cupcakes too!
P.S. Who's serving square cupcakes, ala Josef Albers?
Comments (0) Best Cupcakes - 2008
Oinkster
We are living in an age not just of cupcakes but of cupcakes with publicists, exquisitely art-directed confections whose geometric decoration owes less to Betty Crocker than to Josef Albers. Cupcake manufacture seems to occupy the midlife-crisis Plan Bs that used to be reserved for interior decoration or jewelry design. Eat them, arrange them prettily on a conference room table, mount them on the wall — it really makes no difference. The cupcakes in the display case at the Eagle Rock hamburger stand Oinkster, Andre Guerrero's shotgun marriage of fast-food culture and classic French technique, look like examples of the new breed: pretty, swirly, just lumpy enough to give a Gourmet cover a peppy summer look. It is easy to imagine a box of the carrot-cake cupcakes sitting uneaten on a Stickley sideboard until they eventually stale, or the sticky, snowy coconut cupcakes at a society lunch with precisely one bite taken out of each. But Guerrero is neither a corporate lawyer nor a party planner with a truck-tire-size Rolodex — he's a chef. So the fluffy peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcakes taste like peanut butter and jelly, and those dense, cream-cheese-frosted carrot cupcakes would probably also be the best carrot cake in town if they happened to compete in that category too.
—Jonathan Gold
