Another DC cupcake FAIL

This past Friday, I was actually in Ballston during the lunch/late afternoon hours; it was amazing to see how fun and exciting work lunch can be when you aren't in a dining purgatory like the Mark Center. What I was most excited about, though, was a chance to finally try SweetFleet cupcakes, an Arlington food truck I had been following on Facebook and pining over for weeks.

Sadly, the anticipation was so much more delicious than the actual cupcakes. They are small by storefront cupcake standards...about the size of a homemade muffin and ~2/3 the size of a GTown cupcake, and therefore steeply, steeply priced at $3 each. There were four flavor options the day I visited: blueberry lemonade, red velvet, apple caramel, and mint brownie. I wanted to try one of each, but thought I should start small, so ordered a red velvet (for P) and a blueberry lemonade (for me). Then I rushed home so we could sample our goodies!

You know how I said these cupcakes were small? There were, maybe, 4 or 5 bites worth in each, and still neither of us finished ours. The frosting (mine had buttercream, P's had cream cheese) had just about no sugar, and the cupcakes themselves tasted like nothing. Seriously, I think saltine crackers have more flavor than these cupcakes did. Their one redeeming quality was that they were not, like so many other DC-sold cupcakes, dry. But this was not enough to keep SweetFleet from being an epic fail. I actually opted for a 90-calorie FiberOne brownie instead of finishing. I KNOW.

This, then, got me thinking: WHY is it so freaking hard for these people to make a good cupcake? Safeway can do it. My coworkers and friends can do it. Even I can do it, and I suck at baking! Why can't most of the people who are purportedly staking their financial futures on making a good cupcake manage to succeed? It is a sad, sad, mystery that has gotten me further entrenched in my love for GTown. Although I'm still holding out hopes for Baked and Wired...