Cupcake smackdown!

 

On the left: Sweet Avenue Bake Shop. Home: Rutherford. Opened: August 2007. Known for: its huge array of vegan treats.

On the right: Johnny Cupcakes. Home: Clifton. Opened: this month, in the former Pane ed Acqua (and still using many of those recipes.) Known for: well, so far, cupcakes shaped like burgers, and "customers" who bombard this blog with strangely similar comments.

Smackdown time! Whose cuisine reigns supreme? (Okay, too many bad cliches at once.)

In an effort to settle the schoolyard squabbling going on in the comments section (summed up in Friday's mailbag post), I walked in anonymously to both Sweet Avenue and Johnny Cupcakes on Friday, telling neither who I was. Chatted with both owners, purchased four cupcakes (two recommended by the owners, plus one peanut butter and one holiday peppermint) and took 'em back to the office, where Bill and I tasted, sniffed, smushed, poked, prodded, and generally overanalyzed, all to bring you this exclusive "Second Helpings" cupcake investigation.

Here's how it all shook out:

FRIENDLINESS: Both owners clearly love what they do. Johnny Manganiotis greeted me and said he's been making pretty much everything himself, with his dad's help. He recommended the french toast cupcake, said it's flying out the door and that people are calling to tell him how much they like it. He asked me to let him know how I liked everything. Sweet Avenue's Danielle Vance proudly showed me the little cupcake tiers they were making to display holiday and baby shower cupcakes (plus a great little police-themed tier for a police academy graduation party.) She wished me a great weekend and actually sounded like she meant it. TIE.

CUTENESS OF BAKERY: Perhaps a question of personal taste, but I loved Sweet Avenue's display of cupcakes on little trays, its tiny coziness and cupcake curtains. Johnny just took over, but for now, his place mostly just looks like a bakery. He does sell more stuff, though, like little bundt cakes and different kinds of yummy-looking biscotti. SWEET AVENUE WINS.

SMELL: Sweet Avenue smelled like your grandmother's kitchen. I didn't smell much of anything inside Johnny's, but he said he liked to bake at night. SWEET AVENUE WINS.

CUTENESS OF CUPCAKES: Sweet Avenue's cupcakes are perky and adorable, little works of art topped with crushed candies, little bits of orange peel, crushed peanuts. Johnny's also looked cute, but had less attention to detail. SWEET AVENUE WINS.

PRICE OF CUPCAKES: Four cupcakes at Johnny's were $5. Four cupcakes at Sweet Avenue were $8.35.To be fair, Sweet Avenue's a storefront on Rutherford's busy main street, while Johnny's is in an area with less foot traffic. Still, JOHNNY'S WINS.

GENEROSITY OF FROSTING: Sweet Avenue's frosting covers the entire surface of the cupcake and reaches quite high (unless it's ganache.) Johnny's typically just does a swirl of frosting that doesn't cover the surface, something that Pane ed Acqua did, too. While that's pretty, and allows you to more easily see what kind of cupcake it is, SWEET AVENUE WINS.

RECOMMENDED CUPCAKES: At Sweet Avenue, Danielle said her favorite was the Orange Milana, orange-infused vanilla cake with orange chocolate ganache. She also said Old Skool was popular - it's decorated like a hostess cupcake, with little swirls of white frosting atop chocolate ganache and vanilla cream in the middle. Both are vegan. Indeed, Orange Milana had a great strong orange flavor. Old Skool was a tad soggy in the bottom, but it also had an assertive chocolate flavor and was by far the cutest cupcake I purchased.

Johnny said the french toast cupcake was his favorite and the most popular - it has a pancake/syrup/cinnamon flavor. He also recommended the strawberry shortcake, which had a swirl of frosting and a little dot of strawberry gel. We liked the french toast cupcake - it was fluffy, with a nice sweet cinnamony flavor - but it tasted like a breakfast muffin. (Bill thinks it tastes like Costco's maple muffins.) As for the strawberry, well, it's not that strawberry. There were dabs of strawberry in the cake, but very little strawberry flavor really. The frosting was just weird, tasting like a bad combination of cream cheese frosting and buttercream. So...SWEET AVENUE WINS. (Though if you're heading into Johnny's for the cupcake-and-free-coffee special before 11 a.m., the french toast cupcake would be a great breakfast.)

PEANUT BUTTER CUPCAKE: Sweet Avenue's was a chocolate cupcake heaped with light, tasty peanut butter frosting, and covered with chocolate sprinkles, crushed peanuts and a peanut butter cup. Johnny's wasn't as cute, but its cake was my favorite of all the ones we tried - really moist, really fluffy. The problem, again, was frosting - it didn't taste fresh, and had no pronounced peanut butter taste. So...SWEET AVENUE WINS for frosting, while JOHNNY'S WINS for cake.

PEPPERMINT CUPCAKE: I wanted to try a seasonal cupcake and was curious how each bakery would pull off peppermint. Sweet Avenue's was a chocolate cupcake with a darkish green frosting and crushed peppermint candy canes on top. The frosting was a clean mint taste that went nicely with the chocolate. Johnny's was white cake flavored with peppermint. The frosting was a nasty-looking seafoam green swirl on top that reminded us of toothpaste in both look and taste. It had little dots of a red gel on top. This was the cupcake we ate the least amount of. SWEET AVENUE WINS IN A LANDSLIDE.

CONSISTENCY: All of the Sweet Avenue cupcakes we tasted were vegan, with the exception of the peanut butter cupcake (and we didn't notice a difference between it and the others.) Its cupcakes have a firm, definable structure. Johnny's are more classic, lighter cakes. When we smushed Johnny's cake, it stayed smushed. Sweet Avenue's sprung right back. TIE, depending on what consistency you prefer.

VERDICT: SWEET AVENUE WINS the overall contest. And that's with mostly vegan cupcakes! We meat-product devotees are impressed. Though Johnny Cupcakes is no slouch, especially when it comes to the cake. And it's cheaper. And Johnny is a really nice guy. He just needs to work on his frosting.

So. What do you all think?

Comments

[mike]

I need to try Johnny's, but I am a fan of Sweet Avenue. I'll have to try it and get back to you, but thanks for the heads up!

[Joan Ward]

Johnny cupcakes are ok. They would be great if they didn't taste like they were soaked in oil.

[Jo]

Recently I have been on the search for the perfect cupcake. I have tried numerous cupcake places in NY as well as the two mentioned here. Price or distance do not matter to me..it is taste I am looking for.

After trying many different cupcakes from both NJ bakeries, I prefer Johnny's. His cupcakes are moist and he has a larger selection of flavors. Honestly, with the huge selection he has to offer, I never noticed that the frosting wasn't plentiful. I agree that the french toast cupcake is good but my favorite is the snowball (coconut on top). I have tried this cupcake at Sweet Avenue and Johnny's wins.