Last weekend, during the Taste of Georgetown, I had marching orders (after, that is, passing out City Paper mouse pads, which I think people use to mop up coffee spills now) to pick up cupcakes for a party Carrie and I were hosting that evening. But when I got to Georgetown Cupcake, the line to get inside the tiny store was all the way down the block.

For chrissakes, I thought, you could make cupcakes in less time than it would take to wait in this line. Well, maybe not these Gourmet magazine cupcakes, but in the end, you’d be paying a lot less money per cupcake than those ones at Georgetown. C’mon, folks, give baking a chance!

Don’t tell Ruth Samuelson, but Restaurant Rater discojing seems to like Baked & Wired better than the City Paper’s selection for Best Cupcake. Let the wars begin again!

Here’s what discojing had to say about B&W:

Read More “Vox Populi: Restaurant Rater discojing Dishes on Baked & Wired” »

I knew this day would eventually come. The beer geeks have taken over the Y&H blog! With their unholy alliance of timely information and sheer ambition, they and their kind (those stupid vintage beer commercials!) have captured the top three spots this week.

Here, without further ado, are the most read posts for the week:

1. Vintage TV Beer Commercials
2. D.C.’s a Great Beer City, Chapter 1
3. Upcoming D.C. Beer Events
4. Landrum Releases ‘The Catch’ to Bring On More Burgers
5. Food News You Can Use: Playing Catch-Up Edition

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

People are brilliant. People are mindless cows. Today’s roundup has a bit of both. 

• Chow.com tells us how London’s fast-food chicken outlets have escaped the Colonel’s hatchetmen, including the creatively named Kent’s Tuck Inn Fried Chicken.

Read More “Daily Food Blog Roundup: Random Sample” »

Kirsten Lepore’s stop-motion short gives a whole new meaning to food porn.

Clearwire, which wired the entire city of Portland for Internet, has started to air commercials that feature soft, creamy, yellow cupcakes drenched in multicolored sprinkles. I don’t know what it means, but I’m turned on.

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Mike Licht over at NotionsCapital got way too much of my attention this afternoon with his recent post on food tattoos (scroll down to the bottom of the page to read it). Says Licht: “Cupcakes are big this season, on hips, shoulders, calves, bums, and bosoms.”

He’s not kidding. But what’s interesting is how this unstoppable craze is expressed in skin art.

Read More “Food Tats: Cupcakes Are the New Skulls” »

Yesterday, I made a last-minute dash to Pedro & Vinny’s burrito cart, but by the time I got there, around 2:30 p.m., owner John Rider was already packing up his portable tin can. So I walked across McPherson Square to check out to Organic to Go, the Seattle-based chain that has been spreading like kudzu across the D.C. metro area.

I was not so impressed with my chicken and smoked mozzarella sandwich, which, by the time I got back to the office and unwrapped the bastard, was a soggy mass of bread, melted cheese, and thick slices of breast meat. These are clearly not the conditions under which you should judge an operation, even a budding behemoth like Organic to Go. What really caught my eye, though, was Organic’s display case of cupcakes, which is obviously the current generation’s idea of a security blankie. I mean, you can’t walk a block without bouncing into a cupcake these days. (Maybe someone will develop a shop in which cupcakes are injected with fro-yo?)

So, anyway, I saw these cupcakes, which were not only behind a display case and wearing traditional cupcake-wrapper shorts, but they were also sealed in plastic. I’ll say that again: They were sealed in plastic—at a place that’s committed to green practices. I needed some answers.

First off, a publicist for Organic to Go tells me the cupcakes are indeed not organic. But, she says, they’re all natural, meaning they’re made with no artificial “colors, flavors, ingredients or preservatives.” Then just as I start to check into the plastic container BS, I notice a stamp on its lid: It says Greenware. A quick Google search turns up this informative bit of news from Green Guide:

Research soon yielded the happy revelation that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved drink receptacles made of PLA (polylactides), a polymer derived from corn. Smooth, clear and visually indistinguishable from petroleum-based plastics, the material for these cups is produced by NatureWorks LLC, a branch of Cargill Dow. PLA plastics biodegrade completely in 90 days in commercial or institutional composters, require 50 percent less fossil fuel than regular plastics to produce, and are not toxic to burn.

As for the cupcakes? They were decent—moist yellow cake, without a hint of staleness. The frosting, however, was a dense swirl of chocolate paste, as thick as the commercial toppings I remember as a kid. I don’t think that’s a criticism, just an observation.