Adventures in Portland: Take 2

Cupcake Review #2: Sweet Pea Baking Co. (SE Stark and 12th)

For Annie and my second cupcake adventure we chose Sweet Peak Baking Co. Something special about Sweet Pea is that its a completely vegan bakery. They are pretty cool in that they will make special orders for people with food allergies, and they have lots of wheat-free stuff.

Ambiance: 2 scoops of icing. Although the outside table and fun green sandwich board sign are cute and luring, the inside of Sweet Pea is a little stark. Sort of the industrial type of look with exposed pipes and stuff like that. Definitely not magical or whimsical or any other fun word that should be used to describe a cupcake store.

Customer Service: 5 scoops of icing. The man who helped us was quite nice. Again, very willing to tell the cupcake experts (ie. us-annie and lexy) what each of the flavors were and patient while we tried to make up our mind and choose just one.

Flavor Variety: 3 scoops of icing. Sweet Pea did not have tons of the flavors, but the ones they had were solid. Annie got a mocha, complete with espresso beans on top, which was a cute touch. Lexy got a cocnut cupcake with raspberry icing. They do deserve a little extra credit because we feel that its probably hard to make lots of random flavors and keep with the vegan-ness. Also, about half of their cupcakes are wheat/gluten free and that's pretty cool.

Quality of Cupcake: 4 scoops of icing. Annie really enjoyed her icing--possibly better than st. cupcake. The icing is a little stiffer, so for those of you that like stiff frosting this is the where the icing party is at. The texture of the actual cake was a little denser than normal cupcakes, possibly due to being vegan, different, but still good.

Cupcake Size: 3 scoops of icing. Annie's cupcake was bigger than Lexy's, which made Lexy a little sad. They didn't have mini and normal (or even big) size cupcakes, just all their "general" size, however the size of our cupcakes were quite different. This is sad because maybe you really want a cupcake so you want to pick one of the bigger ones, but the flavor of one of the smaller ones is the one you want to get. I think we all see the problem in that. This is serious business, people.

Sweet Pea averaged a 3.something (again, not math majors). They could afford to hire a deorator to revamp the place and bring it up to cupcake selling standards, but if its nice outside and you can sit at one of the cute tables, its a pretty enjoyable time. So enjoyable in fact, that you can see Annie, Lexy, and Kevin (we brought him one at work... what nice people we are) with our cupcakes. All looking pretty darn excited to have such a yummy treat!