CUPCAKESTOP
Fifth Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Street
New York, NY 10010
n/a

Burger fever, cocktail fever, cupcake fever. These are but a few of the culinary fads that, like a swine flu of calories, have been spreading across NYC in the past few years. Cupcake fever, the oldest, hasn't slowed down. A buddy of mine gets his girlfriend red velvet cupcakes from a bar in Brooklyn, of all places. So the other day after I took the R train to 23rd Street, and happened to notice the bright white CupcakeStop truck with it's loud cupcakestop.com logo plastered across it,, I naturally had to give it a try. I mean, if you can't get freshly baked desserts out of the side of a truck, where can you?

Cupcakestop calls itself "NYC's first mobile gourmet cupcake shoppe". This implies that there's competition from other trucks filled with sweet confections, which there is not... but there may well soon be. Our fair metropolis is a little behind on the times. Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore, San Francisco and New Haven already have cupcake trucks. I almost feel like we're behind the curve on this one.

The CupcakeStop truck sells regular sized and mini-sized cupcakes, so I bought a variety pack of the minis and tried a bunch (but with fewer calories).

The simple standards, Red Velvet and Vanilla-Vanilla, were both very good for cupcakes one eats hours after they were made and sold outside of an office building. The frosting wasn't so sweet that your teeth hurt, but neither was it quite as smooth as you'd get at Buttercup or Billy's. The Mint Chocolate Chip was good but not amazing, as there was just a hint of mint present and the chocolate chips not placed atop the frosting had sunk in the batter down to the bottom. Really, it was more like another vanilla-vanilla, but with green frosting and chocolate chips. Finally, the Chocolate Peanut Butter, which I liked, but liked the least of the four. I think it was the peanut butter frosting, which was very sweet and very rich. It was like eating a chocolate cupcake coated in Skippy. If you that flavor appeals to you, then this just might be your cupcake, but I'll stick with the red velvet.

One final note, I recommend getting the full-sized cupcakes over the mini-sized cupcakes. The minis were a little dry, probably due to their small size (and the fact that I ate them about four hours after I got home). Get the big ones for maximum softness.

A variety pack of twelve mini-cupcakes (three of each pictured above) cost $12.