It all started about two years ago when I was checking out the flavor of the month at Magnolia Bakery.
I’ll have you know that I am a cupcake connoisseur. That is thanks to “Sex and the City” and seeing SJP or Carrie Bradshaw, I should say, eating Magnolia Bakery cupcakes and saying they were so good. As such, one of the first things I did when I moved to New York – before I knew anyone, had a job or so much as a place to live – was find Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker St. to see what all the hype was about.
Mind you, this was in March of 2006, before there were iPhones with GPS. I had to do everything on Mapquest. And yes I was in a rental car, what can I say, I’m a Californian — I hadn’t braved the subway yet.
I ended up finding parking blocks away, and walked to the shop in the freezing cold, just missing a crazy blizzard the city had experienced in February. There was a line outside the door, and they were only letting a certain amount of people in at a time. When I finally got a chance to go in, there were a bunch of cupcakes for the grabbing to my left, piled high with pastel-colored frosting. I thought maybe the color denoted a flavor, but they were all vanilla, so I just picked one.
Then there were these other cupcakes closer to the door. Hummingbird was the flavor, the guy told me. I’d never heard of it before, but I thought what the heck, I’ll try it anyway.
I’ll never forget, the vanilla cupcake was $1.75 and the hummingbird I think was like $2. That seemed crazy expensive at the time, now some of these cupcakes are going for like, $5.
I didn’t end up trying the cupcakes until I got back to the car. The vanilla cupcake was quite disappointing. While the frosting was heavenly, the cake itself was dry and to me, had a taste and consistency more like cornbread. But the hummingbird cupcake, oh my, that was lovely. It’s still my favorite cupcake to this day.
Even though the vanilla cupcake was not my jam, I later gave it another try, and found myself developing a craving for it. I ended up going by several times while I lived in New York, even though I never worked near there and lived in Brooklyn.
Fast forward to 2018 – like I initially referenced in this post – when I was looking at Magnolia’s cupcake of the month before I ended up going through the entire menu. That’s when I discovered that they now deliver via a company called Goldbelly. Looking back, I’m not sure why that interested me because they now have one here locally in LA.
I clicked on Goldbelly and found that it’s basically a mail-order service where you can have food shipped to you from popular eateries across the country. While I was there, I saw this video from Prantl’s bakery:
Seeing those almonds, that cake, the cream – it looked so good. I had to have it. But at the mad crazy price of $50, I was reluctant to buy it. Then when I lost my job soon after I discovered it, there was not just no way.
Fast forward to the present, and for some reason this cake was on my mind again. I looked it up and they still offer shipping, and the cake’s still $50. I ended up buying it on Monday, and it arrived today.
It’s funny, one of the things I’m studying in the Bible right now, is the verse that says “Be anxious for nothing,” and yet as much as I tried not to be, I was anxious for that cake. I saw so many great reviews. I saw some bad ones too, but mostly good reviews. Besides that, it just looked so yummy.
They shipped it by FedEx and I enjoyed tracking it online. It left the Pittsburgh area on Tuesday afternoon and was on a local delivery truck by 9:01am this morning. After that, all I knew is that it would be here by 8pm. But it was hot as hell today, and I feared that my cake would be melting. With every passing hour, I was hoping my cake wouldn’t be mush on arrival, not to mention taste bad.
Any footsteps I heard outside, the neighbors going in and out of their unit, I was thinking was FedEx. Finally, at a quarter to 4pm, it was here.
Be anxious for nothing, be damned, I couldn’t wait to get into that box and taste that cake.
My first impression was that it was much smaller than it appears on their webpage. Granted they do mention it’s 8×8, but it also appears to be a taller cake online. They show it with two layers, but it looks like one layer that they cut in half and stuck custard in the middle.
Then there’s the taste: it was bad. I mean it’s not like the cake was nasty, but it was no where near worth the $50, not even with free shipping. I thought the cake itself could have been firmer. The cream in the middle was pretty good, but nothing special. I wish the almonds on the outside weren’t covered in sugar crystals, the cake and the frosting were sweet enough. Speaking of the frosting – buttercream it was supposed to be – it was the worst part of the cake. It tasted like that cheap, sugary, artificial frosting that they put on store bought cakes, but this was a bakery cake. A $50 bakery cake no less.
Honestly, I would have been better served going to Denny’s and getting their yummy $4 cheesecake with whipped cream and strawberry topping. It’s one of the best cheesecakes I’ve ever had.
I guess the lesson I learned is, really how good could that cake have possibly been? At the end of the day, you can call it what you want (burned almond torte) but all it is just a plain vanilla cake with toasted almonds and cream. How exceptionally good did I expect that to be? Instead I allowed the high price, marketing and positive reviews to allow me to second guess my own logical reasoning.
Also whenever I’m anxious for anything, once I get it, it’s never good as I expected it to be.
Oh, well.
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