Austin Cupcake Crawl: First Stop

It was a boring Sunday afternoon and I was in the mood for an adventure, a food adventure. So I grabbed my pal Vixi Edina and headed out. We had originally planned a doughnut crawl, but quickly realized the folly of our quest. For some reason, the first few places we stopped at were closed, even though they had advertised that they were open on Sunday. Hmmmm...We finally made a stop at a place that didn't have doughnuts, but did have rows and rows of luscious looking cupcakes. I thought, what the hey, let's do cupcakes. Sure, a cupcake crawl is rather trite. The cupcake thing has been a big fad for a while now and just about every Austin food blogger/reviewer has touched on this subject. I've also read other cupcake crawl type postings. We did decide to change ours up a bit by going to mostly places that I've not seen reviewed for their cupcakes by other food writers. We did add in one place that has been hyped to the hilt by other food bloggers. But we skipped the standard Sugar Mama's, Delish, Polkadots, etc, that have been written about ad nauseum.
I'll apologize in advance for the mediocre photography. I don't have a great camera and I'm not used to doing photographs in public places. In some instances, I was trying to do things quickly. Due to the number of photos, I've separated each bakery we went to into a separate post. In the final post, I'll rate the cupcakes from 1st place to last place. Bear with me and it will be a fun ride!

Our first stop was Quack's 43rd St Bakery, 411 E 43rd St. Quack's is in the lovely Hyde Park neighborhood and has been an Austin institution since 1983. Ages ago, when I was a University of Texas student, they had a location on the campus drag, but that's long since gone. Quack's is known as both a coffeehouse and bakery, and is generally very bustling. Vixi and I were overwhelmed by the selection of large, beautiful looking cupcakes. The friendly staff informed us that they are made in-house and they also kindly offered us water. We decided to partake of the chocolate peanut butter and carrot cake varieties.

The chocolate peanut butter cupcake was way off. The icing was too heavily peanut butter tasting and the chocolate cake had no taste.

The carrot cake option was good: nice, moist cake with plenty of nuts and raisins. V and I were divided on the frosting. I thought it was good, but I wanted more of a cream cheese flavor to it. V doesn't like a strong taste to her frostings and thought it was perfect. These were the largest cupcakes of any place we visited.