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Cupcakes! Flour & Sun Bakery in Pleasantville

March 14, 2009

Mmmm, cupcakes! Flour & Sun Bakery opened at 19 Washington Ave. in Pleasantville recently — it’s in the space formerly occupied by the kitchen-gadget store Steel Mandolin, and across from MacArthur’s. When I stopped by on Friday, almost all the cupcakes gave a nod to St. Patrick’s Day, either with green-tinted frosting or ingredients like Guinness stout.

I bought 6 cupcakes for $17.25. Ouch. Regular cupcakes cost $2.75, specialty cupcakes are $3, and some with liquor in them go up to $3.35 apiece. These are the same size as cupcakes you’d bake at home — 2½” in diameter, with lots of height from the frosting. The store has a few seats at a counter that looks out onto the street, and they sell coffee, tea, and milk too.

The thing that struck me the most about all the cupcakes is that they were restrained in their sweetness. There was none of that supermarket-type, clench-your-jaw reaction from the sugar in the frosting. To me, this made them taste much more like a treat I’d craft in my own home: high quality, good ingredients, made thoughtfully.

My official tasting panel included both boys, my parents, and me — we cut the cupcakes into quarters so we could each get a taste of most of them. Overall, we all liked them a lot and having them for dessert felt like a special treat. Cupcakes — any cupcakes — are just a happy food. They remind us of birthdays and childhood and other easy, simple pleasures. It is hard to go wrong with a frosted cupcake!

Clockwise, starting from the top and ending in the center, here’s what we tried:

Chocolate Guinness with Vanilla Buttercreme: My mom and I tasted the Guinness as a very pleasant undertone; my dad didn’t taste the stout at all but still thought the chocolate was good.

Chocolate Mint: A chocolate cupcake with a Peppermint Pattie center, topped with mint frosting. I’ve made brownies with embedded Peppermint Patties, and this cupcake reminded me of that delicious treat. The mint was very pronounced but you still tasted the chocolate, too. My mom and I liked it. The boys gleefully declared it tasted like toothpaste — this was a positive reaction from them. And my father, who does not like mint at all but was eating crumbs off A.’s plate, joked “This is the only cupcake I’ve ever had with fluoride!” If you like mint, you will like this cupcake.

Chocolate with Chocolate Buttercreme: My mom especially liked the frosting on this one, it’s spread on rather than piped and is super-creamy, not hard like some buttercreme frostings can become over time.

Vanilla with Vanilla Buttercreme: A. and G. split this one, and liked it.

Peanut Butter & Jelly: My dad and I split this cupcake — the boys were put off by the jelly on top, and my mom wasn’t interested. While my father felt lukewarm about it — he thought it tasted exactly like a PB & J sandwich rather than a cupcake — I thought it was the most interesting of the bunch. The cake part was much less sweet than I expected, closer to the flavor of a bread than a dessert but with a hint of peanut butter. The peanut butter frosting and jelly topping created the filling flavor of the sandwich. I thought it was pretty bold to go with such a barely-sweet cupcake, and I like less-sweet desserts, so this version gets a big thumbs up from me.

The Lucky: A vanilla cupcake with marshmallow frosting, topped with Lucky Charms cereal. Through no fault of the bakery, the cereal was getting soggy by the time we ate this late in the day. The marshmallow frosting was good, but while this cupcake was super-cute to look at, it was my least favorite to eat.

Flour & Sun is just a few shops down from Try & Buy, a toy store where I often buy birthday presents. I could see stopping in to buy the boys each a cupcake as a treat if I was running errands there anyway.

While Flour & Sun’s prices are on par with other cupcake bakeries, it seems like a difficult time to be selling a product at a premium price point like this. The truth is, I could make these same cupcakes at home. But I wouldn’t. Who needs 24 cupcakes sitting around the house, even if I could make that quantity for less than the price of two from Flour & Sun? So, perhaps it is exactly the perfect time for a cupcake bakery to come to Westchester: who couldn’t use an occasional little luxury in their day for just three bucks?

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Filed under: Restaurants,Things I Love

Tags: bake, chocolate, Chocolate Buttercreme, Chocolate Mint, creamy, Flour Sun, food, Lucky Charms, Patrick Day, PB, Peanut Butter Jelly, Peppermint Patties, Steel Mandolin, Try Buy, Vanilla Buttercreme