Cupcake Road Trip '11 - Day 1: Sprinkles Cupcakes - Palo Alto

When I graduated from grad school, my mom came out so she could help drive me back home to Alabama.  As my graduation present, we decided to make the trip a Cupcake Road Trip, hitting one cupcakery each day as we traveled across 7 states.  You can't do a cupcake road trip that starts in California without hitting one of the many Sprinkles Cupcakes. The original cupcakery, the Palo Alto location was a great start and helped set us on the right foot. In order to facilitate a good comparison across bakeries, we opted to get a red velvet at each, since that is one of the more common cupcake flavors it seems. For this stop, we chose four cupcakes.

From top left going counter clockwise: Red velvet, salty caramel, chocolate marshmallow, and black&white

Red Velvet - the Red Velvet at Sprinkles was moist with, for me, the perfect amount of cream cheese frosting (which is to say not a ton since that flavor is so overwhelming sometimes).  The flavor was, however, not perfect for a Southern girl... that being said, it was still a good cupcake.

Salty Caramel - I was really looking forward to this cupcake and have to say I was not disappointed.  In a word, this cupcake was DIVINE and was the star of the day.  The caramel taste was wonderful and balanced well from the cake to the frosting, which was just buttery delight.  I did not taste the salt, which was a bit of a disappointment since that just makes a salted caramel cupcake so much better.

Chocolate Marshmallow - this cake was a bit of a let down. It was very very dense and did not care for the frosting at all. In total it was very much like a Hostess cupcake in terms of that texture for the frosting.

Black and White - Our last cupcake was less dense but the frosting had no flavor at all. It was almost like eating whipped sugar which was just not appealing.