Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Cupcake lovers, rejoice. For six weeks, we're taste-testing and scoring cupcakes from two bakeries a week, choosing one from each place as our favorite. For the budget-conscious, we're also weighing them and calculating price per ounce. After visiting a dozen bakeries, we'll stack up the favorites in a final round of tasting and pick a winner: Washington's best cupcake. (Our Good to Go feature will return when Cupcake Wars are over.) For Round Five, we sampled from two of the newest kids on the block: the Georgetown bakery that fueled the latest wave of the craze and a Dupont Circle business that opened in August.

-- Joe Yonan

Sisters Sophie LaMontagne and Katherine Kallinis quit their jobs last year to open this business on Valentine's Day 2008, creating such a sensation that they now sell thousands of cupcakes a day (more than 4,000 on Saturdays). 1209 Potomac St. NW, 202-333-8448,http://www.georgetowncupcake.com.

THE RANGE: A dozen varieties when we visited, including all four permutations of chocolate/vanilla, plus triple chocolate, chocolate ganache, lemon blossom, mocha, coconut and caramel apple (a special September seasonal flavor that will return in November).

PRICE:$2.75 each, $15 for six, $29 for a dozen.

SIZE: Smallish, with just the right amount of frosting. (Average weight: 3 ounces.)

HOW DO THEY TASTE? Wow! These are the Nadia Comanecis of the Cupcake Wars: cute, diminutive and the first to get scores of 10. Not all of them, of course; we liked the vanilla cakes less, and we weren't too crazy about the coconut, but most of the others had us using descriptions such as "dreamy," "creamy," "bright" and "sensational."

BEST OF THE BUNCH: Chocolate Squared was so moist, with deep chocolate flavor in both cake and fudgy frosting, that one taster wrote, "I'm not even a huge chocolate fan, and that is a perfect chocolate cupcake." (Score: 9.8 out of 10.)

PRICE PER OUNCE:86 cents.

Penny Karas, a former PR executive who grew up in a restaurant kitchen, opened her Dupont Circle bakery at the end of August. 1351 Connecticut Ave. NW, 202-861-2253, http://www.hellocupcakeonline.com.

THE RANGE: Hello sells about 50 varieties total, serving 14 to 18 on any given day. In addition to a vegan and a gluten-free cupcake, there were 16 varieties when we visited, including chocolate and vanilla cakes with various combinations of chocolate, vanilla, white chocolate, raspberry, strawberry, peanut butter and coconut frostings, plus lemon, lemon raspberry, pumpkin spice, carrot, banana and cinnamon chocolate cake with chili ganache. (Each, by the way, has a cute name, such as Prima Donna, You Tart! and Maya Favorite Cupcake.)

PRICE:$3 each, or $33 for a dozen.

SIZE: Smallish, with a generous beehive of frosting. (Average weight: 3.4 ounces.)

HOW DO THEY TASTE? Overall, pretty good, with moist cakes and decent, soft frostings that tended toward the sweet side. Theirs was one of our favorite lemon cupcakes so far, with a decent tartness to offset the sugar. On the other hand, this batch's low point was disastrous: We love the combination of chili and chocolate when it's well balanced, but theirs, with its overpowering heat, should be renamed Maya Least Favorite Cupcake.

BEST OF THE BUNCH: Vanilla Gorilla, a moist (and fruit-flecked) banana cake topped with a nearly perfect vanilla cream cheese frosting. (Score: 8 out of 10.)

PRICE PER OUNCE:87 cents.