Magnolia Bakery - Los Angeles, CA (also NY)

Chocolate & vanilla cupcakes from visit #1

Chocolate, vanilla, & red velvet cupcakes from visit #1 (I gave some away as gifts)

Melissa, Jason, Izzy, and I saw a taping of CONAN last Monday, 11/28. It was pretty awesome. Conan O'Brien is hilarious live in person and on TV. Melissa held up a sign that said something about having red-headed babies with Conan, but he didn't see it. :(

Anyway, Melissa introduced me to Magnolia Bakery last year when we helped someone in our program collect her dissertation data in LA, but I never posted about it! Here I'll combine both visits into one post. The original Magnoia Bakery is in New York, but this one is in Los Angeles at 8389 West 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048.

I have to say that their vanilla cupcake is the best I've ever had. See below.

On 11/28, I got a flourless chocolate cupcake topped with vanilla bean frosting. The cake was good and reminded me of this kind of flourless chocolate cake from Crixa Cakes in Berkeley (not like this kind from Limón Peruvian Cuisine in Fresno, which was more dense and moist), but the frosting......I don't know. I can see why people would love it and why they would dislike it. At first I loved it, but then I realized that the texture had a silky, almost plastic-like feeling on my tongue that made me feel like I was eating fake frosting that would never digest and would automatically clog every artery in my body. I don't know. Conclusion = I don't like silky frosting. Here is that flourless cupcake:

Back during visit #1 to Magnolia Bakery, in February of 2011, I tried a vanilla cupcake (one of the ones pictured above) and this red velvet cupcake. Stupid blurriness. My fault. Anyway, the vanilla is the best vanilla cupcake I've ever had. It's magical, I tell you. This red velvet one was good too, but I still hold to my belief that Chiffono's has the best red velvet cupcake ever.

 Haha!!