3.9 — Two Bites and Some Fancy

I don't know who the makers of these cupcakes are kidding, but these St. Paddy's day-themed mini cakes don't even register as bite-sized. Maybe "Two Bites" refers to what it would take to eat the entire contents of the package.



Frango's and Dilettante's, two Seattle chocolate originals. I'm not sure about the history behind it, but there is a strong chocolate-making community here in Seattle. There are several home grown companies that pump out gourmet chocolates and candies. Maybe there really is something in the water here that inspires entrepreneurial world domination. We got your coffee, aircraft, delivery services (UPS got it's start here — didn't know that, did you) and gourmet chocolates. There is Frango's, Dilettante's, Seattle Chocolates, Theo's, Fran's, Simply Seattle and a host of others who are trying to spread their cocoa confections across the country.

Enough exposition. Back to the resistance.

Fancy chocolates, I rebuke you!

2.25.11 — Trophy Cupcakes

So Seattle has not one but two gourmet cupcake chains littering the city with their over the top cakes: Trophy Cupcakes and Cupcake Royale. It's interesting that some people have a very strong like or dislike for one or the other. I don't quite get that — they're all cupcakes. Apparently though, you're either a Trophy fan or a Royale fan, but not both.

Me? Eh. The few times I've had one or the other they've tasted about the same — way too sugary. Like some of the other items that come into the office these days, the over-iced cupcakes are fairly easily resistable.

They were apparently used in a client meeting to grease the wheels towards a signed contract. No word on if it worked or not.

12.22.10 — The Good, the Bad and the Evil

One of my coworkers has made a tradition of bringing in bagels and lox each year. He told everyone ahead of time that we was doing it today, so others brought in some fixings of their own. We ended up with several packages of salmon, I think 3 tubs of cream cheese, a couple tubs of egg salad, some red onion, tons of bagels, a box of crackers appeared and then the gift basket lobster spread and salmon spread from one of this week's gift baskets. There was plenty for everyone.

The primary supplier, CR, wanted to know why I was photographing the spread since it was all "healthy." Well, technically, as long as I'm not eating any of it healthy or not, up on the blog it goes. But, as I explained, the only healthy part of all of that was the salmon. On it's own, salmon is great. It's very low cal and has a ton of protein. However, slathering it with cream cheese and egg salad and carrying it around in a big freakin' bagel tends to crank the calorie total up to 11 (on a scale of 1 to 10). So no, I didn't have any.



You might think that salmon and bagels for a large group might be enough food first thing in the morning. You'd be wrong because 3 big bags of candies showed up. Remember the industrial box of chocolates from a couple days ago? This haul had more.

That had to be enough, right?



Good lord. Yes, that is bacon sticking out of the top of those cupcakes. These monstrosities are french toast and bacon cupcakes with maple buttercream frosting. How in the hell is something like this even legal? I was literally stunned when they were deposited on the kitchen table. The audacity, the sheer lunacy of making cupcakes of this magnatude left me unable to form coherent thoughts. All I could get out when I saw the crazy woman who made them was, "What the hell were you thinking?" I understand now how the villagers felt when they saw Frankenstein's Monster for the first time — burn it and hang the creator for bringing such an abomination into the world.

I forgot to mention that she also brought in crumbled up bacon so people could sprinkle more on top just so they could have bacon in every bite.

Of course, the cupcakes were wiped out quickly.



How do you top that? Well, you don't... ever. But, the craziness of the salmon, chocolates and bacon was brought back into a little balance by the arrival of these home baked cookies by one of our long-time copywriters who is now freelancing (well, she got laid off from here last year and is now freelancing, but still loves us). Naturally, I passed on the cookies, but just looking at them restores some of my faith in my fellow humans. Yes, we are capable of creating great culinary evil, but we can also create with love.

12.13.10 — Cupcakes

More Cupcake Royale cupcakes. Yawn.

11.4.10 — Post Party Donuts

The Agency had a big party last night to celebrate winning An Important Award (and rightfully so - it was a radio campaign for a pro-bono client that won the top award in a competition that had never given the award to a PSA before. It really was a big deal. I'm really not being an ass by capitalizing An Important Award).

As these things tend to go with this group, most people who went to the party are in the hurt box this morning. The organizer showed up a little while ago with 5 dozen assorted Top Pot donuts as a way to help ease the rough edges (and oh are there rough edges everywhere).

Normally, as I've pointed out before, the arrival of food in our kitchen and my coworkers' response often reminds me of a pack of starving hyenas falling on a wounded wildebeest on the Serengeti. After this morning's display, I need a new analogy.

Good Christ. 2 dozen were gone in minutes. Minutes.

Maybe piranha cleaning a cow's carcass down to the bone. Or, swarming South American army ants cutting a swath through an unsuspecting village. Or I can go with accuracy - a group of seriously hungover office workers who are desperate for sugar and grease, and haven't made the trek over to McDonalds yet. Yeah, that works.

To make things worse, I was very hungry myself this morning. The smell of all that sugar, grease and quiet desperation was hard to resist.



I do love a good aftermath shot. By the end of the day, there were 4 or 5 donuts left, out of 60.



Mid-afternoon, these showed up. That's right, the leftover Cupcake Royale cupcakes from last night's party. There were close to 30. I almost gained a pound by accidentally breathing near the cloud of sugar haze hovering over the kitchen table. Between the donuts and cupcakes, the aroma was powerful enough that I could smell it back at my desk.

10.15.10 — And So It Begins

I've been dreading this day - the beginning of the Halloween treat smorgasbord. It will start slowly, in this case with some extra cupcakes someone brought in from a batch they made for their kid or some other thing that doesn't impact my life, and pick up speed as we get closer to the end of the month. Then there will be an explosion of treats and candy culminating in the big day. We'll probably be having a party at the office and then the wife and I will be fending off the neighborhood ankle rats all night long.

And then we're into the official "holiday season" which means food flowing like water through this place. It's going to be a rough couple months.