My family has a tradition of celebrating our kids’ monthly birthdays with a cupcake and candles, all the way until they turn 24 months old. I have three kids, so that means we do a lot of celebrating, and we buy a lot of cupcakes. I’ve tried most of the Bay Area’s top cupcake places, but this week I tried (and loved) something new: Cupcakin’ Bake Shop in Berkeley.
Cupcakin’ is the creation of owner Lila Owens. Like many of the best Bay Area bakeries, Cupcakin’ started out of Owen’s kitchen in 2007 as a cottage food business. The company expanded, and in 2014 Owens launched a “cute little bake shop” in Berkeley. Cupcakin’s website says that Owens “wanted a fun culture, adorable décor and artisan baked goods made from high quality, sustainable ingredients” at her bakery.
Nearly eight years later, Owens appears to have achieved exactly that. There are so many cupcake places in the Bay Area — and the concept of a $4.25 cupcake squares so perfectly with the Bay Area’s ethos of “quality above cost” — that the cupcake concept can feel overdone. Plenty of places make beautiful cupcakes. To stand apart, a cupcake-only bakery thus needs to do something really outstanding, or risk blending into a backdrop of cupcake mediocrity.
Going mini
Cupcakin’ breaks out of this by selling cupcakes that are intricate, obscenely detailed, and really, really good. The bakery also distinguishes itself by selling mini cupcakes. Mini cupcakes are usually dried-out, simple affairs —a bunch of plain vanilla cupcakes that you buy in a box at Safeway and don’t really enjoy eating, for example. Cupcakin’s mini cupcakes are different. I tried a box of them this week, and I’ve never seen so much care and attention put into a mini cupcake before.
To give a sense of what goes into one of these mini cakes, let’s take a look at my favorite flavor from Cupcakin’: their key lime pie mini cupcake (pictured at top). The cupcake is topped with a tangy, cream-cheese-like icing, with a bit of lime zest shredded over the top, and a sprinkle of graham cracker crumbs. Under this is a thick layer of tasty, dense yellow cake. The cake, in turn, is filled with key lime cream. Beneath that is a solid layer of a graham cracker crust, simulating the bottom layer of a traditional key lime pie.
To recap, that’s six different individual elements, all crammed into a cupcake that’s about 1 inch tall. Who puts that much attention to detail into a mini cupcake? Apparently, Cupcakin’ Bake Shop does. Not all their cupcakes are so complex, but they’re all extremely delicious. I also tried their red velvet cake mini cupcake and a salted caramel flavor. They all had flavorful frostings and dense, fresh, delicious cake.
Perhaps the best thing about Cupcakin’s mini format, though, is that you can eat a bunch of these tiny cupcakes in one sitting. I find that big cupcakes can get monotonous; you take one bite and you’ve tasted the thing, yet you still have a giant hunk of cake to munch through. Cupcakin’s mini cupcakes are perfect because you can eat one in about two bites, and then try another flavor. Again, choosing a mini cupcake would normally mean sacrificing quality, but with Cupcakin’ Bake Shop, that’s definitely not the case.
Since Cupcakin’ sells their mini cupcakes in packs of a dozen, there’s plenty of sampling potential. You can drop into their Berkeley storefront to choose flavors for yourself, or trust Owen’s team to choose a set of the day’s best mini cupcakes for you. You can even order a dozen cupcakes on Doordash for delivery to your front door. Cupcakin’ Bake Shop also gives back to local hospitals, firefighters, and the like — when you buy your own cupcakes, you can opt to purchase one to send to a local hero during their next delivery.
I’ll definitely be going back to Cupcakin’ Bake Shop for more of their tasty, tiny cakes. Once my kids age out of monthly celebrations, I may need to find something else to celebrate regularly, to ensure that I have a solid excuse to keep ordering them.
Thomas Smith is a Bay Area food and travel photographer and writer based in Lafayette.
