Sweet Scout Takes the (Cup)Cake

I never got the cupcake thing. When I was a kid and there was a birthday party at school or a holiday celebration in the classroom, someone's mom always brought cupcakes. I ate them, because, you know, cake. But I never understood why cupcakes were preferable over actual cake. Is it just because you don't have to cut and serve them? Is it because they're small, and therefore automatically deemed cute by some people?

We never made cupcakes at home. It was always a layer cake or sheet cake or even bunt cake. I think maybe there were two things behind this. One, if you want cake and frosting, then you must want a lot of it, right? Why unwrap six cupcakes when you can have one decently sized piece of cake? Plus, that piece of cake is easier to put ice cream on, which was a favorite thing to do in our house.

Two, my mom hates to cook and bake. Always has. She's good at it but despises the effort. I can see where she might have thought that lining twelve cupcake tins with paper, pouring batter evenly into all of them and then having a dozen things to frost and arrange on a plate was a bit too much work. Especially considering the frequency with which we consumed brand new cakes.

Yeesh.

I'm just now getting on the cupcake bandwagon. But are gourmet cupcakes any better than the grocery store-baked kind I've avoided for most of my life? I picked up samples from two local bakeries and one grocery store to see what the deal was.