AlwaysInvestigating: CupcakeStop’s Cupcake Truck

The Gluttoness — June 25, 2009

You know you’re onto something when The New York Times and CNN feature you before you even serve your first cupcake. The idea for the CupcakeStop was dreamt up by Lev Ekster while studying at New York Law School. The cupcakes are baked in Brooklyn by a professional pastry chef, Manal Mady, and Ekster twitters the location of “New York’s first mobile cupcake shoppe”—a popular methodology of roving food trucks also employed by Wafels & Dinges and LA’s famed Kogi Taco Truck. The flavors on the day that we sampled CupcakeStop included: Red Velvet, Oreo Crumb, Peanut Butter and Jelly and Tie Dye.

The menu should immediately alarm any cupcake aficionado. CupcakeStop’s flavors are eerily similar to Baked by Melissa’s bite-sized confections. In fact, all four flavors can be found at her sliver of a storefront located on Spring Street near Broadway, where miniature cupcakes also sell for $1 (CupcakeStop’s full-sized sweets cost $2.25). Unfortunately for CupcakeStop, these carbon copy cupcakes don’t come close to the moist originals. The cake was dry, closer in texture to a stale muffin than a cupcake, and the icing wasn’t nearly sweet or creamy enough to overwhelm the average bottoms.

The best of the bunch was the Oreo Crumb, a chocolate-flecked vanilla cake with cookies-and-cream icing. We wouldn’t go out of our way to find CupcakeStop again but we won’t rule out stopping by to curtail a cupcake craving.