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cupcakes

Laura's quest for the summer is to find the best cupcake in Atlanta. She has graciously allowed to participate in some of this venture and to blog about all of it. The idea is at each location to sample a plain (vanilla?) cupcake, a chocolate cupcake, and at least one of whatever kind of specialty cupcake they have.

We have to go back a couple months to start: when Betsy was in town the weekend of the Inman Park Festival, she and Laura stopped at the West Egg Cafe and picked up a few samples. They didn't have chocolate cupcakes from what I recall, so we sampled plain and CocaCola, what they're known for. My recollections of these cupcakes is that they were really dense and rather dry. Not what I'm looking for a in a cupcake. The Coke was OK- definitely tasted like Coke, more moist, but I just don't really want to eat Coke cupcakes. The general consensus was a thumbs down on West Egg. Laura was a bit disheartened, but I told her that if it was that bad, things could only go up from here!

A month or so later, Laura and Laura sampled at the Atlanta Cupcake Factory. I was sad to miss out on this one- aside from the fact that its closest on the list to my house, I had heard they were really good. From the report I got, this was another disappointment, except for the icing. I think they tried all 3 and the special was Red Velvet, but I could totally be making that up. Icing was cream cheese based and pretty good they said.

After berry-picking Thursday, Laura and I walked up to Belly to try their cupcakes. I have often seen them in the windows and drooled- enormous cupcakes with enormous amounts of icing. We tried all three, plain, chocolate, and peanut butter and jelly. The chocolate was terrible- as if they were trying to make a healthy cupcake. It almost tasted like it had been made with whole wheat flour, very little chocolate taste to it, and very heavy. The plain cake itself was good- best so far in that category. Light, moist, and tasty. Unfortunately, their frosting is the sugariest frosting I've ever tasted- one bite of it was sufficient for the whole cupcake. The peanut butter and jelly was OK. Laura was not a big fan of the whole concept. I thought the peanut butter icing was good, though a little thick for a hot summer afternoon.

Overall, Laura's impressions so far are that Betsy would make a fortune selling her cupcakes!!

posted by CP @ 12:14 PM 2 thoughts

Marginal Employment Day

As a teacher, I get a lot of flack about having my summers off. Brent refers to this concept as marginal employment. For these two months, I am getting paid without doing any work. Brent himself is marginally employed as a postdoc at GaTech- he gets paid, but doesn't have enough work to do or supervision to be considered fully employed. However, Brent was recently hired as a professor at Northern Arizona University and will soon be fully employed, not to mention leaving Atlanta.

So yesterday, in order to celebrate the state of our employment, we held Marginal Employment Day, a day where we participated in activities on a weekday that those who are fully employed can only do on weekends.

To start things off, we headed to brunch around 10:30 at Highland Bakery. The waitress, when told of our plan for the day, brought us what she called "marginal samples of our marginal food," (their food is hardly marginal!) which consisted of two slices of their ginormous cinnamon rolls. We had a lovely time sitting outside enjoying the cool breeze, good food, and good company.
From there, we headed back to my house, with the intention of starting to drink before noon. Margaritas were the plan. Unfortunately, due to an ice/water hose fight, a blender which had not been properly put back together after its last use (and the clean up required in the margarita-mix-all-over-the-counter debacle), and brief hysterics on my part, it was shortly after noon before we were able to imbibe. We toasted Marginal Employment Day, sat on the porch and talked for an hour and a half or so. Sitting on my front porch is good for my soul, any sort of day.A rousing game of bocce in the park down the street came next. I dug a hole for myself at 7-16, but managed to pull out a 20-18 victory. Brent decided that I won only because I had gradually sobered out during the course of the game.Next on the list of things to do was to visit our friends at their places of full employment. Jeremy was first on the list. As he is a tax attorney who bills his time down to every 6 minutes, Brent had cleared a visit with him 24 hours in advance and I was given the task of alerting him to our impending arrival. Brent said he would leave his shirt on in the building and take his hat off, but he only made good on the first. I think the receptionist thoroughly enjoyed our marginal employment shenanigans and Jeremy was kind enough to give us 0.1 hours of his time.From there we headed across the connector to visit Nathan, who works in IT. Nathan was more than willing to give us over 0.5 hours of his time and we got a tour of the TV and radio studios. Brent even got to pretend like he was working. We also stopped by Georgia Tech to visit some of Brent's grad student friends whom he claims do not get paid enough to qualify for marginal employment.We arrived back on the front porch a little after 5, the perfect time to unwind on the front porch from a tough day of marginal employment with leftover blackberry cobbler, peach ice cream, and more good conversation.

posted by CP @ 6:04 PM 0 thoughts