Sprinkles!

Sprinkles is a bakery in Palo Alto that is part of the famous Beverly Hills chain. I had not heard of them, but apparently they're a big deal, and the owner judges Cupcake Wars or something.

I'd only been to a cupcake-specific shoppe once before (in Washington, DC), so when we received my birthday card from Jonathan's parents sponsoring a trip, I was really excited. I immediately looked up their hours and carefully studied the chart of which days have which flavors (I was shocked that there were some flavors that were only available one day a week!). We ended up going on Monday, almost a week after my birthday. When we arrived, we realized that we had been very close once. The cupcakery was only a few doors down from Max's Opera Cafe, where we ate once with Andy in 2009.

We chose two flavors each to take home and enjoy over the next couple of days. My first selection was banana, with vanilla frosting. Jonathan (of course) went with red velvet with cream cheese frosting. I also chose cinnamon sugar, which is a spiced buttermilk cake with cinnamon sugar on top... no frosting. The last selection was the vanilla cupcake with chocolate cream cheese frosting. About an hour after we got home we decided to enjoy some cupcake action. My first bite into the banana bursted with flavor. The vanilla frosting complimented it very well, and it was very banana-y through to the end. Jonathan took a bite and also thought that it was the epitome of "banana," LoL. Jonathan really enjoyed the cream cheese frosting on his. We agreed that the red velvet flavoring was not typical... it certainly had a non-chocolate flavor, and without the accompanying cream cheese frosting, it would have been difficult to know for sure that the flavor of the cake was indeed red velvet.


We saved the other two until the following evening (and I forgot to take photos as we were eating those ones). We couldn't wait any longer than that, since they use no preservatives and they really recommend that people eat them the day of purchase. We kept them in individual ziplocs to keep them fresh. The top half of the cinnamon cupcake was delicious- the cinnamon did some sort of caramelizing or something to the cake, resulting in a wonderful taste. The bottom half was kinda plain... it did have a nice spice to it, but a little disappointing. The vanilla cupcake was pretty plain, but the chocolate cream cheese frosting was wonderful. I probably ate 1/3 of that one, since Jonathan wasn't a big fan.

Overall, it was a cool experience. I don't know that I'd pay $3.50 for a cupcake (they weren't over-sized or anything), or that I'd want to eat one on-the-go (they were matched really well with milk!), but it's worth a trip. Oh, and those cute decorations on top were crunchy and not good (well, I didn't even try one, but Jonathan tried those on both of his and wasn't pleased).