Bakery Review: Simply Cupcakes

In the summer we all travel to get away from regular, daily life.  I guess one thing I will never be able to (or want to!) get away from is cupcakes.  So even in Northern Michigan it seems I can locate a cupcake shop.

Simply Cupcakes, a cute little place in Traverse City, MI, was actually spotted by my mom who suggested going in to grab a cupcake (or six).  We ended up getting a half dozen to split with the family.  We picked creamsicle, peanut butter, caramel pecan, blueberry, sweet and salty, and caramel toffee.

These are BIG cupcakes.  Not quite Crumbs cupcake size, but they are more muffin-sized than the dainty little standard cupcakes.  They are also piled high with frosting.  These two factors combined make them rather hard to eat!  Most of my family reverted to a fork.

I'm going to continue to compare these cupcakes to Crumbs cupcakes for several reasons.  They all had prominent flavors between the dense cake and the light swiss meringue buttercream, and many of them were filled.  However, I found the lighter colored cakes a bit dry and dense for my preference.  The clear winner of the flavors was the sweet and salty- the chocolate cake was extremely moist and the density complemented the flavor very well.  The light buttercream was the perfect complement with just a bit of crunch from the pretzels on top.  Unfortunately the dense cake didn't work as well with the lighter caramel cupcake or the peanut butter one.

However, these were not by any means bad cupcakes, I would just stick to their chocolatier flavors.  Plus, their swiss meringue buttercream is absolutely fantastic.  I never have the patience for swiss meringue, but it is really wonderful on a dark cupcake!

Margaret