Take the Cake: Sweets

Take the Cake has been around for a fairly long time. I first encountered it on Main Street and was sad to see them move to Northside (right after we moved to the neighborhood, I tried not to take it personally).  I only made it to their first Northside location once, but have made several trips to the new “Take The Cake Cafe” which now serves savory lunch items to complement the sweet baked goods.

I’ll definitely want to do a post about the savory options soon, but that will have to wait. Today I am focusing on sweets. I did not think to take any pictures of the space, but luckily local shutterbug 5chw4r7z did, and you can go look at his post for some good shots.

My son turned 2 on Wednesday, and since the big family shin-dig is on Saturday, we decided to have a small celebration for him last night. We needed cake, but not a lot, so three Take The Cake Cupcakes fit the bill perfectly. There were only three choices when I was there, Chocolate, Carrot and Velvet. I went with three chocolate (with a transportation fee I’ll mention at the end).

There is nothing like staring at three luscious cupcakes for half a day, but I managed to wait. The cake had a nice, rich chocolate flavor and was moist. The buttercream icing was delicious, but I have always thought they put a bit much on for my taste. All three were adorned with a piece of shaved chocolate.

I know they also have Coconut cupcakes, and they had some sort of black-bottomed cheesecake cupcake monstrosity (what can I say, not a cheesecake fan). They also do custom cakes, including wedding cakes, and other sweets. They had two different bread puddings in the case, a Chocolate and a Vanilla. They use left over cake scraps for the bread pudding, so I can only imagine how good those must be. They also had some brownies.

Melissa (one of the owners) recommended the Peanut Butter Brownie. And you know, I didn’t want to be rude, so I got that as well for my “transportation fee” for running the errand.

Now I imagine I’ll be making the following recommendation fairly often on this site. You see I am picky, and very self-aware about that. And by picky, I don’t necessarily mean I have high standards, it’s just there are things I don’t like, but I know most normal adults do. So, I didn’t care for the brownie, but I can recommend it to folks.

One of the things I do not care for is cream cheese icing. I like cream cheese, but the combo of sweet and cream cheese sets me off. The peanut butter icing was a cream cheese icing. Probably pretty good for most folks, but not a win for me. The brownie was rich and delicious, nice peanut butter taste, but the cream cheese set me off a little bit. Didn’t stop me from finishing it off, but I will not get that again.

I highly recommend this place. It is a nice space, they obviously care about quality, and the selections are very flavorful. I realize as I wrap up I did not pay attention to cost, and their site is down right now. But I can safely say, the Cupcakes are worth it.

Tagged as: bakery, brownie, cake