It’s a Monday afternoon, 1:30 p.m. to be exact, and I’m waiting in a line four people deep for a cupcake. No, I’m not in New York City or Los Angeles where I’m sure the lines are even longer; I’m in Roanoke at Bubblecake’s Crystal Springs location. And guess what? The cupcakes are worth waiting for.
Lisa Lusk, owner and head baker at Bubblecake, opened the bakery’s doors in the summer of 2009. The candy-pink striped walls, porcelain scalloped cake plates, and sunny Candy Bar (featuring imported German gummies and chocolates displayed in apothecary jars and sold by the pound) transport me to a real-life version of Candy Land, minus the Molasses Swamp. It’s a look that seems carefully curated, yet genuine, and, to be frank, I don’t want to leave the shop.
Armed with a pastry degree from the Culinary Institute of America and years of experience as a chef in New York City and Miami, Lusk crafts some of the most innovative yet comforting (in a reminds-me-of-a better-tasting-childhood-than-my-own kind of way) cupcakes I’ve yet to try. From the ultra classic Tiffany – a moist vanilla bean cupcake that almost tastes like cheesecake topped with a light blue almond frosting the color of its namesake’s diamond boxes – to the hodgepodge Mudpie – a rich chocolate cake domed with two inches of coffee frosting, coffee caramel, crushed chocolate cookies, toffee bits, and, yes, there’s more, marshmallows – Bubblecake’s cupcakes are in a classy, sugar-laced league of their own.
And they’re not alone in this town either. A hop, skip and a jump away is Grandin Village’s Viva La Cupcake, the brainchild of Roanoke native Pennie Ahuero. Viva La Cupcake is prime real estate, on the corner of Grandin Road and Memorial Avenue, and the plate glass windows offer plenty of natural light to fill the industrial-chic shop. Glass antique cake plates display the six or seven kinds of cupcakes Ahuero bakes daily, and pastel bunting hangs from the rafters. It’s a more modern take on a bakery and one that I think fits in well with Grandin’s hip-family vibe, with the C.I. and Grandin theater only doors down.
On a quick glance, the cupcakes at Viva don’t seem comparable to Bubblecake. The icing is a bit thinner, the decorations more homemade. But what Ahuero’s cupcakes lack in the stylized perfection of Bubblecake’s, they make up for it with bold, unique flavors. A self-trained baker who spent 15 years in the Navy as a nurse, Ahuero loves recreating childhood non-cake classics in cupcake form. Take her Key Lime Pie cupcake, for example, which tastes, you guessed it, exactly like a key lime pie. If not for the light, definitively cakey texture, I would have guessed I were biting into a slice of pie, the vanilla icing with crushed cookies a perfect substitute for crust and meringue.
Unlike Lusk, however, Ahuero also plays with alcohol in her cupcakes – something I heartily approve of – and the Godiva Liqueur cupcake I sampled was a nice post-work snack (of course it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere…). A chocolate cake with a liqueur truffled center, the cupcake was a fantastic mature twist on a classic child-friendly treat.
While it’s easy to say that cupcakes are cliché – after all, cupcakes take the cake – it’s hard not to fall in love with both Bubblecake and Viva La Cupcake. From the classic Black and White (vanilla cupcake, chocolate ganache) at Bubblecake to the After Five Line (those fantastic cocktail-inspired and booze-infused cupcakes) at Viva, it’s hard to go wrong. The issue for me, though, is choosing. But who says you have to – I’ll take both. I
