Etude no. 12: Cupcakes!

= WARNING - VERY IMAGE HEAVY! =

This weekend, a couple girlfriends and I went into the City to go on a cupcake crawl!  It was like a barcrawl except waaaaay better: instead of hopping from bar to bar, we took the train and hopped around all the delicious cupcake boutiques that the Chi had to offer. 

Our day started off at 11AM at Millennium Park - the weather was extremely sunny and in the mid 80s:

 

 Our first stop was Sugar Bliss, cake boutique.  Clean and roomy with a girly floral theme - but this did not deter the guys from stopping in!  I did see a couple brave souls walk in to buy cupcakes "for their girlfriends".  Right ;)

 

 We wanted to pace ourselves since we were planning on hitting up 6 stores, so we ordered mini cupcakes and split them.  I ended up trying half a cotton candy cupcake and half a carrot spice cake.  The frosting was the best part - it really did feel like I was licking cotton candy off of the sugary cupcake!

 

 Took the red line down to More's Cupcakes - just look below at all those cupcakes!  The store was really tiny and decor was pretty sparse, but the cupcakes spoke for themselves.  We tried a cookies and cream cupcake and believe it or not, a BACON BACON BACON cupcake.  No lie, that's what it was called.  The difference between a bacon bacon cupcake (yes, there were both options) and a "bacon bacon bacon" cupcake was that the bacon(x3) had a chunk of bacon inside.  What the heck, right?  I tried some of the frosting, and it tasted like a breakfast biscuit with bacon gravy - I felt my heart stop for a good second or two...

 

You could see us in the reflection below:

Next stop: walked over to Sprinkles - I wimped out because I was getting full.  It was a shame; apparently they have a "whisper word" that they send out on twitter.  The "whisper word" lands you a free cupcake on those lucky days - I was so full I couldn't even breathe out "ten days" to get my free strawberry cupcake, blechhhh.

 = Lunch break: ate tomato and crab bisque at the Water Tower Place, where I took a very charming photo of myself in these absolutely FABulous pineapple glasses at a photo wall=

 = Lunch Break officially over =

 Cupcake stop #4 was at Swirlz Cupcakes in Lincoln Park.  Hands down, the prettiest cupcakes on our crawl, with the friendliest storekeepers!  We each got a Swirlz pin-button to commemorate our crawl and an employee offered to take a group photo of us in front of the store :)  We tried the blackberry cheesecake, red velvet, and the "twixy", which definitely tasted like a Twix bar, yummmm.

 

 

 

Unfortunately soon after, I received a text from friend warning us of a thunderstorm.  We didn't believe him since it was so warm and sunny, but a mere 2 minutes later, it started POURING.  I blame him - that text was the proverbial rain dance that sealed our impending doom :(  We hit up one more store, "Molly's Cupcakes", and enjoyed a delicious peach cobbler cupcake (my favorite during this whole cupcake crawl), before calling it a day.  I was so 'caked-out at that point that I was glad I didn't have to save face and stuff yet another complex carb down my throat.  The rain let up a bit, so I stopped by Dave's Records on Clark Street to grab a Ratatat vinyl, hitched a ride over to Halsted to buy bento box materials, grabbed dinner and finally headed home to sleep off the biggest sugar crash EVER.  All in all, a wonderful weekend indeed!