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| - There are a number of places in Madison, WI these days where you can buy a $3 cupcake. I'm sure our grandmas would be baffled and enraged at the price, but I eat a lot of boutique cupcakes when I want a little high-end sugary treat.
Bloom Bake Shop is now my favorite place for this.
Forget about Gigi's in Hilldale. Their shop smells incredible, and their product is very pretty, but they taste like screaming sugar regardless of what kind you get. Plus, their cupcakes are huge: 4" high, have about half a CUP of industrial buttercream piped sky-high on top, packing a 750 calorie wallop. Yeah you heard me. 750 calories.
Bloom cupcakes are far more modest and more like an actual "serving" of cupcake, measuring a mere 2" in diameter and possessing an unassuming, but very pretty, whorl of frosting that has clearly been applied with your regular ol' friendly spatula by an actual human being exerting some wrist action. It's a home-baked look. The cake itself is a little denser than you may be used to and very tasty.
The frosting, however, makes the Bloom cupcake something special. When it comes to high-quality organic butter and milk, there is a fresh, creamy quality that one does not find in the conventional product. The rest of the organic movement is completely under my radar - I can't taste the difference and for the most part don't care. The Bloom cupcake captures something genuinely delicious that the partially hydrogenated alternatives can't - the flavor of butter made from pure milk made from happy cows that I get the feeling ate nothing but pretty flowers all day long.
Also, there is a friendly young guy there with a seriously awesome Seth Bullock-style 'stache. It makes the purchasing of cupcakes that much more fun.
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