The Soda Shop Strawberry Frosted Vanilla Cake

On another beautiful Sunday, my best cupcake-tasting posse and I embarked on another Cupcake Crawl, this time farther downtown. This time it was unfortunately hovering around 100 degrees and I promptly wanted to melt, so the lounging-in-the-park-with-

cupcakes experience was more sweaty and melty and sticky and thirsty than last time around. However, a good time was had by all, until we all wanted to die from a combination of heat and cupcake-overdosing, that is. Importantly, I should mention that before I transcribed my cupcake rankings onto the computer, I took notes by hand on SPECIAL CUPCAKE RANKING PADS that my best cupcake-tasting friends (Caryn, Lawrence and Justin, along with fellow friend and sometime-cupcake taster Mike) specially DESIGNED for me and gave me for my birthday, complete with a special Caryn-designed logo. I am going to scan some of the cupcake-tasting pad sheets and upload them in a future post! And now, the results of Cupcake Crawl #2!

Strawberry Frosting on Vanilla Cake from the Soda Shop

Taste: Ahhhh! My mouth, ahhh, stop! The frosting tastes like butter and artificial strawberry flavoring and makes me want to gag. The cake is even worse, and has a sour, unpleasant taste that is hard to put my finger on, but it reminds me of Tonnie's Minis. Ack! Overall Taste Rating: 1.25 out of 5 Sprinkles

Texture: EW EW EW, the cake is SO moist that it's wet, clammy, SLIMY, not cake-like, like some sort of cold, bastardized bread pudding mush, this is just WRONG, its like someone poured water or milk all over the cake and made it into a sopping, slimy heap. The frosting is ultra-dense. Overall Texture Rating: 0.25 out of 5 Sprinkles

Aesthetic: The beautiful pale pink frosting swirled in the shape of a rose is what attracted me tot hos cupcake-- look how gorgeous the aerial view of the frosting swirl is! Doesn't it just look like it would taste SO GOOD?!??! It didn't, looks were deceiving, but the aesthetics were exellent. Overall Aesthetic Rating: 4.75 out of 5 Sprinkles

Satisfaction: I am completely grossed out, but it sure was pretty to look at.* Overall Satisfaction Rating: 1.5 out of 5 Sprinkles

Overall Cupcake Ranking: 7.75 Sprinkles (out of 20 possible)

*I would like to note that the cupcakes were retrieved from us from a back room, rather than a display case, and felt cold. While on a hot day a cold treat was appealing, a cold cupcake is not customary nor advisable. I suspect that some of the unfortunate texture issues related to the Soda Shop cupcakes resulted from erroneous refrigeration on the part of the store. I am not sure whether such refrigeration is customary or was a result of the extremely hot August day, but as any cupcake expert is aware, buttercream should NEVER be refrigerated! The refrigeration may have also added to the slimy, clammy texture of the cake. I'm not positive the refrigeration occurred or resulted in the bad texture, but I have my suspicions.