sarahntastic

Thanks to American Express for sponsoring my writing today about small businesses. American Express is presenting Small Business Saturday, a way to honor the local merchants who are the backbone of the economy, this Saturday, November 27. They’re offering statement credits to people who shop at small businesses, advertising for small-business owners, and donations to Girls Inc. for “Likes” of the Small Business Saturday page on Facebook. Join the celebration by clicking the “Like” button and then visiting the Facebook page to learn more about the program and read the terms and conditions that apply.

This time of year we are trying to balance family time, menus, school vacations, and work schedules. How do we also make sure to fit in our regular workouts? I know it’s hard for me to maintain an exercise routine without the stress of the holidays! Never fear, Words to Sweat By is here! This small business combines humor, fun, and motivation all in a hand-sewn towel. My favorite is “10 More Reps and the Cupcake is History.” The designer, Whimsical Walney, has created 12 different mantras. You are sure to find one to fit everyone on your gift list this year. And did I mention the towels are super-affordable at only $9.95 each? No more excuses! Get your shopping done this weekend!

The shop recently added eco-friendly, reusable snack bags, too.

Find my favorite small business, Words to Sweat By on Twitter, too.

I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

So, we left Hillcrest to meet friends Downtown, but sitting at Babycakes for the next several hours would have been totally fine with us.  Let’s just call this a huge, gigantic, massively spot-on recommendation from Kristin.

Downtown, after a few times around the block, we parked directly in front of Heavenly Cupcake. Extra bonus was no coins in the meter after 6pm, and we pulled up at 5:45! (more reviews here)

This shop is super cute, but in a totally different way.  It has clean lines, in a retro-modern sort of way.  And of course the turquoise signature color gets me all the time.

And the “Dog Parking” sign with the dog water bowl will always sell me on a place, no matter what.  Add to that dog cupcakes and they would have to do some kind of crazy hokus pokus thing to turn me off!

Heavenly Cupcake touts itself as a cupcake lounge, and it really is.  There are comfy sofas as well as tables and chairs.  but they must have a good cupcake to seal the deal—and they do.

Here’s me & Bad Baby enjoying the lounge:

I will say they come in a very close 2nd to Babycakes overall, but the cupcakes here really are very good.  We ordered three.

The chocolate with peanut butter frosting was tasty and moist and not too sweet.  The pumpkin had great flavor, not too sweet, and a bit spicy, which I really like.  I also loved the frosting to cake ratio.  And do you see these fantastic melamine retro trays?  C-U-T-E!

Next was the vanilla caramel.  The cupcake was subtle and sweet but all natural without the yucky fake vanilla flavor you find with Sprinkles cupcakes.  The caramel drizzle was a nice addition.

If you can’t make it to Babycakes, Heavenly Cupcake is a perfect alternative.  However, they are only a mile from each other, so why not visit both?

I bought a t-shirt, too.  Peace, Love, Cupcakes.  I couldn’t resist!

After dinner, we said goodbye to our friends, got in the car, and immediately started talking about how dinner was nice and all, but a pistachio cupcake would hit the spot!  So what do two normal adult siblings do at 9pm with totally full guts and having already eaten plenty of cupcakes do?  We head to Babycakes for a night cap, that’s what!  And I wasn’t embarrassed at all that the lovely gentleman remembered me from earlier.  Ok.  I was a little bit embarrassed.  But all was made good when he told me the pistachio cupcake “holds my heart forever.”  Swoon, swoon, and more swoon over cupcakes and handsome men.

We picked up a pistachio cupcake for each of us, and on a whim, I bought the Blood Orange cupcake.  I forgot to snap a pic, so you will just have to believe me when I say, this was the most luscious, amazing, interesting, almost indescribable cupcake I’ve ever eaten.  The essence of Blood Orange in a fluffy vanilla cupcake is a must-try.

Now if only Babycakes would get on twitter, my life would be complete.

I didn’t have much planned for my San Diego trip other than hiking and visiting with my brother, but thanks to one of my favorite twitter friends, I was inspired to plan a cupcake tour of San Diego.  Kristin suggested Babycakes (more on Babycakes here), Extraordinary Desserts, and Cupcakes Squared.

After research via browsing yelp and determining a proper map of cucpakeries from Santee to Downtown, we started out Saturday afternoon for what we hoped would be hours of lovely cupcake eating.

Our route would be Eclipse Chocolat, Extraordinary Desserts, Influx, Babycakes, and Heavenly Cupcakes.

Eclipse Chocolat is a cute place, but not a cupcake bakery.

There is chocolate everything, including a monthly prix fixe dinner of chocolatey things.  The cupcakes were disappointing.  Very dry, and just not tasty at all.  For $3.50 I was hoping for a great cupcake.  Yelp reviews are pretty good, so maybe Saturday at 4:40pm is not a good time for a cupcake here?

Next stop:  Extraordinary Desserts.  Now, this place must be some kind of sweets holy place because friends, acquaintances, strangers asked over and over if I would be including them in my Cupcake Tour.  And yelp?  Massive lovers of ED there.  So you might imagine my huge disappointment when I arrived to find only very fancy pastries and cakes with fresh flowers piled on top.  Not one single cupcake in the place.  I was confused.  I didn’t want puff pastry.  I wanted cake.  So we left, cupcake-less.

Influx was a stop I picked instead of Cupcakes Squared.  There are great reviews on yelp of their cupcakes, and Cupcakes Squared has mixed reviews, and it wasn’t really on the route to downtown, anyway.  However, we were once again disappointed.  Not a single cupcake in the place.  In fact, the entire front display case was empty.  At 5:30.  And they are open until 9pm.  Confused?  Us, too.

But we refused to be discouraged.  We had two stops yet to make, and we trusted they would be good ones.

And we were right.

Babycakes?  What can I say other than, I love you.  Not only is the shop in the hippest neighborhood in San Diego, it’s super cute in an old Craftsman, vintage furniture, open until midnight, and oh, did I mention they serve wine and beer?

Needless to say, I had good feelings about this place.  The line was several people deep, a few couples were waiting for wedding cake consultations, and, well, handsome men wearing t-shirts with “Babycakes” emblazened across their chests?  Yummy before we even got to the cupcakes.

How to decide?  They were all gorgeous.  We picked three.  When you eat at the shop, they remove the cupcake liner and drizzle chocolate or fruit sauce over the cupcakes.  Oh, and the cupcakes are the jumbo size.  Big.  Not regular, not mini, but jumbo.  And they are $2.75.  This is a huge bargain over any other shop I’ve been to in price alone, let alone for a big, huge, satisfying cupcake.

The Babies:  Marble cake with chocolate chip cheesecake in the bottom.  moist, sweet, tart, gorgeous.

Vanilla with rapsberry filling:  moist, sweet but not too sweet, amazing buttercream frosting, again not too sweet, tart dab of berry filling, just yum.

Pistachio: This was my overall favorite.  I haven’t tasted anything like this in my life.  It was luscious, not too sweet, original, moist, and pistachio, pistachio, pistachio.

I tweeted, emailed, texted, facebooked, tweeted more about Babycakes and the pistachio cupcake.  We still had one more stop to make, but I didn’t want to leave Babycakes.  Because we were meeting friends farther downtown, we left, but it was hard to do.  This stop made up for the previous three duds, exponentially so.

Next up:  Part II: Heavenly Cupcake, and post-dessert dessert at, you guessed it, Babycakes!

I finally found time to swing around to Stanford Shopping Center, specifically to try Sprinkles (more on Sprinkles here from Uptake) cupcakes.  The shop is tiny, and there seems to be a constant line out the door.  I am fairly convinced the small shop along with painfully slow service is part of the company’s gimmick to keep a line out the door.  Certainly the quality of the cupcakes do not bring this many people in constant flow to Sprinkles, right?  Because not one of the four flavors we tried was worth the trek, let alone the $3.75 each.  We ordered:  dark chocolate, lemon, vanilla, and peanut butter chip, sharing each one, finishing none.

The dark chocolate tasted like a regular chocolate cake.  There was nothing exceptionally “dark” about the cake or the frosting.  The sprinkles on the top were gritty, and the frosting was jaw-locking sweet.

The lemon frosting was way too sweet, and not butter cream.  I couldn’t have more than one bite.  The cake tasted like a box cake mix with a very obviously fake lemon flavoring.

The vanilla frosting again was way too sweet, and not butter cream.  The cake itself was undercooked and tasted like dough.  The vanilla flavoring tasted fake.

The peanut butter chip ended up the best of the four, but still wasn’t great.  This is a big deal for my mom since she doesn’t normally like peanut butter.  The cupcake is peanut butter cake with chocolate chips, again tasted doughy and undercooked.  This was the best frosting of the four, but was still way too sweet.

I felt like I needed to eat a block of salt after all the non-flavor sugary nothingness I paid 20 bucks for at Sprinkles.  I won’t be going back.  And needless to say, if people really do like these cupcakes, they either a) enjoy participating in the hype or b) haven’t ever had a really good cupcake.

And don’t get me started on $1.75 for a box if you’re only buying one cupcake.  Puuleeze!  They are already charging ridiculous prices for flour, sugar and not butter, they can’t put a cupcake in a box if you are taking it home?  Huge fail.

I have lots of etsy friends on twitter, but one jewelry crafts-woman extraordinaire always makes me smile when she posts new items.  She is Sharla, of Sharma Designs, and I love, love, love her jewelry.  I know jewelry.  I have an extensive collection of vintage costume jewelry, vintage Mexican silver jewelry, and of course, lots of handmade jewelry from various artisans.  Sharma Designs is unique, pretty, has a vintage sensibility (can you say lucite?), and to top it all off, it comes in almost way-too-cute to open packaging.

When Sharla posted she needed just 6 more sales to hit 1,000 in her etsy store, I decided to finally put my money love where my mouth was, since I have been re-tweeting her listings for months now.  Of course, once I started looking through the jewelry, there was no way to decide on just one thing, so I bought five.  All gorgeous, a few in mind for gifts, though I’m not sure I’ll give them up, and all extremely well made, and just beautiful.

And since I was *almost* her 1,000th sale, Sharla included this super cute enamel pendant necklace!

Because my photography skills leave lots to be desired, here are links to everything I purchased: green lucite earrings, tortoise lucite earrings, brass bird earrings, wood earrings.

Go shop!

OK, so I know with all my tweets and talk about how much I love food and drink,

it will be totally shocking to learn that I am not a skinny girl. I exercise and try to eat well most days, but I have this….thing that never, ever goes away. It’s what I refer to as my 2nd gut.

Although my mother says “as long as your tits stick out farther than your stomach, you’re fine” it’s just not OK for my 2nd gut to hang out when I’m trying to look all cute and everything in my cupcake t-shirt.

Which is why it’s extra-odd that I do not buy foundation garments, girdles, gut sucker inners, or any other way-too-tight underclothes.  I just figure that I have what I have, and all the spandex in the world isn’t going to change that.

And these things aren’t cheap.

Oh, and nothing really works for me anyway.  I’ve given up trying these torture devices on, because I sweat and squiggle and finally get it on, only to see there is no noticeable difference in my before and after 2nd gut appearance.

Until….

My not-so-surprise 37th birthday party was imminent, and being unemployed and having worked from home for years anyway, and having lost nearly 100 pounds the last couple years, I didn’t really have much in the way of going out clothes.  Having read a few times about Yummie Tummie via various women on Twitter, I thought I’d at least look at a tank at Nordstrom (strappy long).

Ummm, this thing is amazing.  Not only is the girdle-y part only in the middle, unlike other foundation garments that are lycra up to your boobs and down to your thighs (thanks, but I don’t need lycra to squish out my boobs into my armpits), it ACTUALLY WORKS.

I went into the fitting room skeptical, as you might imagine, but very quickly was more than pleased with the result.  Yummie Tummie is not torture to put on, and get this, I noticed at least two inches gone from my 2nd gut (I didn’t even think to check my 1st gut which was probably slimmer, too).  I had my bff confirm my 2nd gut was indeed seriously, noticeably sucked in (and she knows, I point to my 2nd gut 442 million times a day and say to her “I wonder when I’m going to give birth to this fucker?”).

If I wasn’t unemployed, and had a proper foundation garment budget, I would have bought a bazillion of these.

Yummie Tummie rules.