Cupcake tour of Manhattan

I went to New York at the beginning of September and still haven't written about it. I'm planning on doing so in the next little while.
As part of the trip, we decided to do a little tour of some of the cupcake vendors in the city.

1. Baked by Melissa
We had the best cupcakes first. These bite-sized cupcakes (which I forgot to take a picture of - I was too excited to eat them) were
delish. They were one-bite shots of flavour. My favorite was the peanut butter and jelly. I would have liked to try the mint chocolate chip and cinnamon flavours had they had them. The cupcakes were not too sweet and exactly what the write-ups described. Just like min-cookies, I could eat a ton of these things. I'm glad that we only bought a small box to split. Oh man, they were good.

2. Magnolia Bakery
I didn't take a picture of the cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery, but if you really want to see what they look like, you can see a previous post from my first trip to New York. I would say that although there are many many people (tourists and New Yorkers, alike) that flock to the bakery, they were probably my least favorite cupcake of the bunch. The one thing I do like about it is that it's across the street from the crazy Marc Jacobs stores with the ridiculous sales.

3. Crumbs Bake Shop
I really liked these cupcakes as well. They were massive (more like, big muffins) and came in some interesting flavours. It was hard to decide on just one. I think that's the great thing about mini-cupcakes. You can sample more. This cupcake was creamsicle flavoured and was quite good. My only complaint about their cupcakes was that the icing was too sweet. Other than that - yum.

4. Cupcake Cafe
Nothing too special about these cupcakes, but for aesthetic appeal, these ones are the definite winners (although, the mini-cupcakes were quite well done as well). They looked like oil paintings. I wonder how they got the petals to have different shades on them. They were, what I would call average cupcake size. They were tasty, but nothing super special.

5. Buttercup Bake Shop
These cupcakes were battling for last with those from Magnolia Bakery. In my mind, they were your average, run of the mill cupcake. They looked generic, and they tasted generic too. They were a smidge better than the Magnolia Bakery ones, but I think that's because they weren't as dry.

6. Kyotofu
The final stop on our cupcake tour. Their award winning Chocolate Souffle Cupcake was...ummm, okay. I don't think my opinion
about the cupcake was hampered by cupcake-fatigue, but I didn't find the cupcakes to be too spectacular. They were unique, so I'll give them points for that, but they weren't anything exciting. I'm not a big fan of Asian flavoured pastries, so that probably didn't help matters. I guess I'll say that there are more than enough cupcake shops in the city that I'd rather go somewhere else.

So - lots of sugar in a short amount of time. A cupcake for breakfast isn't a bad thing, is it? The clear winner in this tour was the mini-cupcakes, with the giganto-cupcakes coming in a relatively close second.