No Longer MIA

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated - I have been away for the summer living it up in American suburbia doing a quite impressive impression of a "Soccer Mom" with the seven seater mini-van and everything. The nightmares will continue for a while I'm sure. Anyway! I was lucky enough to have tried some amazing cupcakes while I was away so here are some reviews!

The Cupcake Brake, Hartford Connecticut (various locations)
As you might have guessed from the title this is a cupcake truck! The Cupcake Brake is a yellow truck which parks up in a different location in downtown Hartford on most weekdays. You can find the address on their twitter and their website where you can also find a list of that days available cake, frosting and fillings. The Cupcake Brake is a pretty popular bakery in Hartford judging by the queue upon arrival just 15 minutes after the trucks arrival. The cake available to us that day were:

CUPCAKES:
Charter Oak Chocolate
Mohegan Mocha
Colony Carrot
FROSTINGS:
Vanilla Buttercream
Chocolate Buttercream
White Chocolate Cream Cheese
Brown Sugar Buttercream
FILLINGS:
Marshmallow
Boston Creme
Peanut Butter
Chocolate Ganache

My favourite combination of the above was the Charter Oak Chocolate filled with Peanut Butter and topped with Vanilla buttercream, the perfect balance between sweet and salty. We ate these cupcakes several hours after buying them and they were still perfectly moist and light, by far the best cupcakes I encountered in America - including Magnolia.

Sugarbelle, Glastonbury Connecticut 
I heard the name of this bakery all summer, from a lot of different people. It was in the next town from where I was staying on my last day I got the GPS together and went to find these cakes I'd been hearing so much about! Glastonbury is a cute family friendly New England town, and hidden away among the Starbucks and Whole Foods store is Sugarbelle. Its a small place, obviously still finding its feet if the empty cabinets and website "under construction" but they had a very good selection of flavours and friendly staff so me and my two cousin's (Drew aged 5 and Delaney aged 7) were happy with our visit. We got a dozen cakes for my "farewell" party.

Flavours are: Peanut Butter Chocolate Ganache, Cookie Dough, Vanilla Bean, Red Velvet, Chocolate Raspberry and Key Lime Pie. All the cupcakes were gorgeously presented, topped with fluffy icing and filled with gooeyness but definitely not the best cupcakes I've ever tasted, in all the cakes there was an underlying taste of Crisco/shortening which made the cakes taste overly processed. A little disappointing.

I have a lot more to talk about but I'll save it for another day! Enjoy!