If Ever Oh Ever a Wiz There Was

Cake decorating can mean a lot of different things. Take a Wizard of Oz cake. On the one end of the spectrum, you’ve got your airbrushed supermarket yellow cake with lots and lots of gooey frosting and a plastic Dorothy and Toto stuck on top. On the other end of the spectrum you’ve got the cake Sweet Tempered put together for Mia’s birthday:



This is one of my personal favorites, and I was able to catch up with Christy this week on some of the wizardry involved in making it happen.

If you’re going to have an emerald city, it might as well look like emeralds. So, Christy built this one out of stiff fondant, and set it glittering with edible gold dust in the background. The basket’s Fondant too, a little extra thrown in for fun. The yellow brick road was piped on with a basket weave tip, and field of poppies was applied in little frosting kisses, one bloom at a time. There’s a tornado out on the far side, and lollipops. But the real coup de grace, the detail that you will never, ever, ever find on a grocery store cake?



The shoes. In Ruby fondant.

Here's to Mom

Moms rock. They roll. Moms stand us up, hold us together, banish nightmares, mend skinned knees, and heal wounded egos. Moms bring wisdom, love, and understanding. Without moms, we would, quite simply, not exist.

This last Sunday was Mother’s Day – a tiny glimmer of recognition for hard work often under-appreciated. I like to think that moms the world over got to take a moment of rest, got some extra hugs, got a gift or two from their adoring fan base. I hope all moms got to partake in some really delicious treats. Christy and Jennifer did their part to make that happen, hard at work at Sweet Tempered Saturday putting the finishing touches on a mountain of Mother’s Day cake orders.

The way I see it, one Sunday, even one Sunday with chocolate-layer-cake-with-ganache-filling-and-cream-cheese-frosting, even one Sunday with a blue sky and birds singing, doesn’t really cover it. Here’s to a little Mother’s Day appreciation every day. Mom deserves it.

The First Annual Cupcake Invitational

The cupcake renaissance has hit Austin with full force, and people all over the city have started to take notice. Cupcakes are showing up everywhere: topped with bows at Birthday Parties, stacked high in pastel buttercream at Baby Showers, grouped in eyebrow raising arrangements at Bachelorette Parties, and layered in elegant tiers for Weddings. And many a happy cupcake-loving Austinite has a favorite; a neighborhood joint, somewhere off the beaten path, and always fiercely defended as the Best There Is. Some of us go so far as to offer to blog for our favorites. But I digress.

So how to sort through all this subjective fandom? Leave it to the Austin office of Deloitte Consulting to take a more scientific approach.

On March 27th, on the heels of a corporate training, consultants from the office gathered in a conference room for an Austin Cupcake Invitational. Here’s how the competition went down, according to an anonymous source at the office:

We worked with 4 bakeries, Hey Cupcake, Sweet Tempered, Polkadots, and Delish. Each bakery provided us three types of cupcakes – Chocolate, Vanilla, and Baker’s Choice. Each cupcake was judged on three separate criteria – taste (10 pts), appearance (5 pts), and frosting (5 pts). To avoid predispositions to any one particular vendor, we put cupcakes from each bakery on a color coded napkin and kept the true identity a secret until the end. [ed. note: That's Sweet Tempered on the yellow, Polkadots on the blue, Hey Cupcake on the White and Delish on the Red]

So, how’d it turn out? Who’s cupcake reigned supreme?

With the highest scoring cupcake overall (peppermint with chocoloate ganache), the best Vanilla, and huge accolades through the afternoon, Sweet Tempered took a clear victory.
The final Tally:

Bakery	Chocolate	Vanilla	Baker's Choice	Average
Sweet Tempered	13.33	13.36	14.75	13.81
Polkadots	13.71	11.91	14.00	13.21
Delish	11.92	11.91	12.60	12.14
Hey Cupcake	09.43	10.29	13.25	10.99

Stumbling out of the room, each on the verge of a sugar coma, the judges declared the Cupcake Invitational Complete. They also renamed it:

The First Annual Cupcake Invitational.

We’re expecting others to wage a fierce battle for next year. And I fully expect another Sweet Tempered victory. You know why? ‘Cause they’re the Best There Is.

Liquid Assets

A really good espresso will drip out of the filter in slow, delicious drops like warm honey. It’ll be a little nutty, with a nice crema and rich carmelly texture. Mix it with milk and it’ll take on other dimensions – maybe a hint of chocolate or citrus. And the whole fantastic process that results in the latte you’re sipping out of that vintage porcelain cup at Sweet Tempered gets roasted over at Austin’s own Owl Tree Roasting.

Here’s how it goes down. A few select farmers in a few select spots on the globe grow really good coffee. And a few select roasters get a crack at making it great. Travis, over at Owl Tree has been doing this for years, though only recently on his own. The beans are blended, roasted, cooled and zipped over to lucky homes, to Progress Coffee, and, of course, to Sweet Tempered.

A spin round the flat burr grinder, a solid tamp in the portafilter, a little rotary pump action and voila what started as a little red berry on the Brazilian hill side is now a luscious espresso.

What comes next is up to you – how about a latte and a square of Sweet Tempered blondie? Or maybe a cappuccino and a chocolate-covered marshmallow? Or my personal all time fave: an espresso macchiato and a ganache filled peppermint cupcake. And there you have it: the sure fire cure for interminable afternoons.

A Mariachi Welcome for Milo

Some things just go together:

Peanut Butter and Jelly

Bluebonnets and Springtime

The 4th of July and Fireworks

Babies and Mariachi Bands

OK, maybe that last one is just an Austin thing.

For Brooke the choice was an easy one. What better way to celebrate the imminent arrival of baby Milo than with an extra-big dollop of festivity. And what’s more festive than a Mariachi band on a breezy day in the lovely trees of Garrison Park with 5 levels of Mariachi cupcakes, complete with Sombreros, Maracas, and Buttercream. Brooke's good pal Colleen gave Jennifer a call, and the rest is cupcake history.

Want to put your own unique spin on a baby shower? Check out the gallery at Sweet Tempered for inspiration, come up with your dream cake vision, and give Jennifer and Christy a shout to work out all the details. I’ve got it on good authority that, for a limited time, custom cakes over $60 get an extra 10% discount. Ole!

Red Velvet Revival

It’s 1956. Ties are skinny. Thelonious Monk records Brilliant Corners. Charles and Ray release the Eames Lounge Chair. And, somewhere in the South, Red Velvet Cake is reaching the peak of its popularity.

While we’re still waiting for a revival of 1956 cool, we can at least comfort ourselves with one very revived Red Velvet cupcake. Maybe two. We’re hungry. 

The inspiration for the Sweet Tempered Red Velvet cupcake comes from Jennifer and Christy’s childhood fave, The Red Oven bakery at Bowen and Park Row in Arlington, TX. The Red Oven is one of those places that doesn’t do trendy. They do what they do, and trendy occasionally comes around to meet them.

So, Jennifer and Christy both had a pretty good idea of what this cake was going to be about. Balance. Restraint. Deliciousness. There was to be no goopy frosting, no neon red, no overpowering chocolate. They worked for weeks. For months. And finally, they found it, topped with a special hybrid of buttercream and cream cheese frosting, the Red Velvet Cupcake was reborn in its former glory, right here in Austin. Available to all you hep cats out there every day but Sunday at our swingin’ South Austin pad.

Putting the Sweet in SXSW Film's Sweet 16

16 years ago, on the heels of Austin indie film classics like Slacker, SXSW went from the most insane music-everywhere-you-go-week in Austin, to the most insane music-and-film-everywhere-you-go-week in Austin.  This year:  33 films. On the first day. 

We’re loving it, and so is A&E Indie Films, the folks who sponsored this year’s kick-off party at Buffalo Billiards.

So, you’re planning a kick-off to something big and spectacularly cool. We figure you’re going to want a cake. A big cake. A spectacularly cool cake.  And that’s what A&E Indie Films thought too.  The result: Christy’s  4 tiers of rock and roll goodness for the festivities.

Happy Sweet Sixteen, SXSW film!

Spring Is In The Air

13 degrees in Boston. Flights into Atlanta canceled due to blizzard conditions. You'd barely know it was spring if it weren't for the current crop of Sweet Tempered cake creations. That's right folks, 'tis the season for butterflies and flowers.

Take Ella's birthday cake for example. A few weeks back, looking out at the budding trees and feeling the warm breeze, Ella decided what she wanted most of all was a butterfly birthday. And what better for a butterfly birthday than a Sweet Tempered butterfly birthday cake.

Invitations were mailed, the date was set, and Ella gave us her specs: Very Chocolate. Very Pink. And just like the butterflies on her invitation.

Needless to say, it was one happy just-turned-eight-year-old that came into the store that Saturday. And, judging from the pictures, one happy crowd of Ella's friends and their grown-ups once the candles were blown out and the slices of fudge-layered devils food cake were handed out.

Ella's already put her order in for next February: An Astronomy Party. In chocolate.