Amy's Bread, the vanilla version

Since it was my birthday earlier in the week (not sure if you knew), the other day my lovely coworker and former boss M brought me an assortment of cupcakes from Amy's Bread (thank you M!). HowEVER did she know I liked cupcakes? I couldn't wait to get these home and dig in.

So many goodies inside...

The assortment included two chocolate with vanilla frosting, two red velvet, one vanilla with pink frosting, and one vanilla with chocolate frosting. I loooove their chocolate with vanilla frosting, but since I've already recorded my love affair with that cupcake on this blog, I decided to go for their vanilla with pink frosting for the sake of my readers. Out of the box it came.

Such diversity

It was a really beautiful cupcake, with defined frosting swirls and a demure sprinkling of colorful decorations. I had put these cupcakes in the fridge (bad, bad me... I know you're not supposed to do that... but if I had left them out they would just have melted into a butter-and-sugar puddle in this extreme heat), so there was definitely a chill on them, but I didn't want to wait for a suitable thaw, so I dug right in.

Prim and pretty.

As usual, I cut this baby in half and tucked into the cake first. The one way I can describe Amy's Bread vanilla cake is: pound cake. This was pound cake, pure and simple. It was so buttery, I think I heard my arteries whimper just a little bit. The cake was cold so the butter was firm and the cake was incredibly dense. There was a tiny bit of vanilla flavor, but truthfully, the overwhelming and dominating flavor of this cupcake was BUTTER.

The cross-section

Close up on cake texture... see the layer of compressed butter cake under the frosting

The frosting was delicious, of course, and there was a lot of it. I should have waited for it to thaw a little bit, because it definitely had an overriding buttery mouthfeel rather than that ideal satiny frosting touch. But nonetheless, it had a great sugary flavor and that exterior crackle that makes Amy's frosting to likeable.

Nice frosting-to-cake ratio

Overall, this was a solid cupcake. It wasn't as good as Amy's chocolate cake with vanilla icing, which is a contender for best cupcake in Manhattan. But if you like vanilla cake, and especially if you like pound cake (or just the flavor of butter), you'll like this cupcake. Stop by Amy's, and once you've tried the black and white cupcake, give this one a shot.