NYC: two little red hens bakery

Midday on a weekday you can actually sit down at one of the three sunny tables at Two Little Red Hens on the Upper East Side.

Berry crumb pie on special for $2

vanilla/vanilla cupcake

chocolate/chocolate cupcake

Buttercream Philly foodtruck

Philadelphia is having a veritable renaissance of dessert/cupcake oriented foodtrucks including http://www.buttercreamphiladelphia.com/ . This truck annoys me slightly due to its inanely enthusiastic twittering and the fact that it is varying its scheduled stops every week right now, forcing me to actually DO SOMETHING to find out where it is. Also $2 for a small cupcake is a mild ripoff. $2 for a variably sized cupcake is also annoying.

The three in front are banana cupcakes frosted w/ Nutella buttercream. They are about 25% smaller than the ones in the back. The bigger cupcakes are chocolate cake w/ peanut butter buttercream and vanilla/vanilla.

Brooklyn Blackout cupcake

from Two Little Red Hens on the Upper East Side in Yorkville.
Filled with a chocolate pudding centre. Excellent, although I didn't need the pudding.

cupcake truck

Some cupcakes from Buttercream, a cupcake food truck in Philly. The cupcakes were reasonably good and not dry/crumbly, but I don't think I need to seek them out.

Happy Groundhog's Day

It is Groundhog's Day in North America, a day of weather prognostication and cranky sleepy rodents.

Apparently everyone saw their shadow.

It is also the day of the anniversary of the birth of my brother, 4 of my other friends (seriously), and my über boss.

So I made some celebratory cupcakes. (Cupcakes = 1 batch of Cook's Illustrated Best Recipe chocolate cake (first version in the book), 1 batch of Smitten Kitchen's Double Chocolate Layer Cake adapted from Gourmet March 1999 frosted w/ chocolate ganache.)