Post’s Cupcake War Is Over, But the Battle Rages On

After visiting 16 bakeries, consuming 35 pounds of sweets, and ingesting more than 11,000 calories per taster, the Washington Post finally declared a winner in its Cupcake Wars contest. Georgetown Cupcake took the top prize after sweeping the first seven spots in the Food section's list of the highest-rated cupcakes.

Food Editor Joe Yonan and his team deluged readers with stats and tips (otherwise known as "commandments"), but they still didn't satisfy all of my questions about the paper's hard-to-resist eight-week series. Yonan was good enough to take my questions. His responses have been edited, paraphrased, and otherwise mangled, though hopefully not in a Deborah Solomon way.

What was your methodology? With two exceptions, the tasting team visited each bakery anonymously on Tuesday in the early afternoon. They'd buy one of every kind of cupcake available that day and bring them back to the office, where the sweets would be brought to room temperature (if necessary) and eaten within "a couple of hours" of purchase. This was not a blind tasting; logistics prevented such a tasting. The four tasters would each silently eat one quarter of a cupcake and make his or her evaluations on a number of criteria. Only then would the tasters compare notes and calculate a score. No bakery was ever visited twice. "The time involved would have made it just impossible," Yonan says.

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