Can’t top Gigi’s Cupcakes

LITTLE ROCK — Oh em gee! We have a Gigi’s Cupcakes location!

Cupcake aficionados in central Arkansas have drooled for the day that we’d have a bakery specializing in cupcakes.

Uh, well another bakery specializing in cupcakes. We already have several (and at the rate they’re opening, they could one day hope to outnumber frozen yogurt outlets).

But can there be such a thing as too many cupcakes? Gee whiz, no! (Now, there might be such a thing as too much icing. More on that to come.)

The Little Rock Gigi’s Cupcakes, open now in the Park Avenue shopping center (the Target center — between Radio Shack and the Carter’s kids clothing store), is part of the country’s largest cupcake chain founded by Gigi Butler in Nashville, Tenn., which has expanded to 23 states. And more stores are planned, including one expected to open within the next month at 12800 Chenal Parkway.

What’s on the menu: cupcakes. More cupcakes. And drinks (coffee, milk, apple juice, soda and bottled water). And a few mini cheesecakes. And still more cupcakes.

Some 30 cupcake flavors appear on the full fall/winter 2012-13 menu, with about a dozen available each day. Cost is $3.25 each, $2.75 each per dozen.

One can have a seat at a few outdoor tables, two indoor tables (dressed with faux pink gerbera daisies) or at a counter lining the front windows. But most people get their treasures to go — in girlie greenbrown-and-pink packages that resemble gift boxes and matching shopping bags.

These are no box-of-cakemix-and-can-of-frosting cupcakes. Baked, iced and blinged-out on-site (Miss Princess cupcake: “white cake with fresh strawberries baked in, topped with a cream cheese frosting, pink sugar crystals and a pink fondant crown,” available on Fridays), these are works of edible sculpture.

They’re also big. And rich. And sweet. Really sweet.

A couple forkfuls (there’s really no eating these frosting-full, top-heavy desserts with your hands) into a Chocolate Covered Strawberry cupcake — featuring a dark chocolate cake, a puffy pink fluff of icing then capped with even more chocolate that didn’t have a lot of strawberry flavor, but certainly had a lot of sugar — I knew I’d have to have some help with this assignment.

To read the full article from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.