Cupcake Crew Has What Might Be the Best Cupcake in NYC

While out trying to find a decent banh mi the other day, I happened to spot a food truck I’d never seen downtown: Cupcake Crew. Black with a giant pink cupcake on one side, I knew it was going to be my kind of truck.

The menu was small–six cupcake flavors–but that’s great for someone like me who can’t make decisions. I’m usually a vanilla cake/vanilla icing kind of girl, but the cream cheese icing on the red velvet was calling to me with its perfect dollopness and its tiny sugar sprinkles.

It was a really good cupcake. The cake was the right amount of moist, and although my first impression had been that there wasn’t a good icing to cake ratio just because a little of the cake was visible on top, it turned out that the extra-sweet cream cheese was rich enough to satisfy even a sugar freak like me.

I did admittedly miss the filling you see in other popular cupcakes about town, but I got the feeling this was supposed to be the kind of cupcake your mama used to make and bring to your first grade classroom on your birthday.

But the Graceland was the real treat. I wasn’t even supposed to have it, actually; when I mentioned it was my first time at the truck, the friendly Brooklynite manning the counter offered me one of their mini cupcakes (normally $1.25) in another flavor to sample. If I’d had time to think about it, I probably wouldn’t have even chosen the Graceland then, because banana isn’t one of my favourite flavors.

It turns out, though, that this is one of the best cupcakes I’ve ever had. The peanut butter frosting was INSANE in the way only peanut butter mixed with more sugar can be. The chewy chunk of bacon on top added so much depth of flavor with its smoky finish. And even the banana cake was something I’d be happy to eat on its own! (It helped that there were little chunks of bacon mixed in.) I’d be really hard-pressed to think of a cupcake I’d rather eat than this one.

I’m really excited now to try some of their other featured flavors.

(five stars for the Graceland, and three for the red velvet)