Tasty Tuesday/Cupcake Chronicles: Magnolia Bakery

excited to taste my purchases! :D

1.) Happy Back to School to all of you who are still in school!  Here's to a year of good grades, lots of fun extracurrics, minimal stress and sufficient sleep! :D

2.) I love cupcakes and I love Sex & the City (the TV show, not the movie).  Thus, it was only logical and right for me to visit Magnolia Bakery, the cupcake shop in SATC.  I thought that there was only one shop in Manhattan in Chelsea (or was it the West Village?), but one day on our way to 30 Rock, we saw a line wrapped around the corner of a building under the sign, Magnolia Bakery!  Naturally,
we put our original plans on hold to line up.

I’d tried two other cupcake places in Manhattan at that point and was not impressed at all.  They weren’t terrible so I won’t write about them here, but I was just really disappointed because I fully expected New York cupcakes to be far superior to their Toronto counterparts, if only by virtue of the fact that there’s a lot more competition.

But this was The SATC Cupcake Place, so we gave it another try and boy, was I glad!  Of the eventual four cupcake bakeries I visited during my last trip to Manhattan, Magnolia was by far the best.

The bars looked really good too!

Truth be told, I didn’t eat mine until the next day because I was already really full after grazing on New York deliciousness all day, but even at a day old, they were just right!  The cake was moist and fluffy without being oily, the frosting wasn’t cloyingly sweet, the cake to frosting ratio was good (well, they could use a lighter hand with the frosting but it was better than the other places I tried), the ingredients were good quality – it was a very, very good cupcake.  

The one on the far left was for me - the other two were for my little cousins!

I wish they were a little more ornate and that they had more flavours to choose from, but they had all the basics down – vanilla on vanilla, chocolate on chocolate, vanilla on chocolate, chocolate on vanilla (my fave!), red velvet.  This place was also pricier than the other places at about $3.25 per cupcake but it was well worth it after the other boring cupcakes I had.

The location I visited was:

Magnolia Bakery
1240 Avenue of the Americas, New York

There wasn't a lot of choice left by the time I got there!