Batson's Blog

After the success I had in Cornelius last week , I figured, why not try and make it two for two. When I Googled 'cupcake shops cornelius' a shop called SweetCakes showed up -- just off I-77 at Exit 21. It's located in a shopping center that was surprisingly crowded for my mid-week trip during the middle of the day. After navigating through a bit of congested traffic, I stepped inside the shop. It looks exactly like it does on the website. The cupcakes look the same too. Cookies & Cream It seems like strawberry is one flavor that every cupcake shop has. The other flavor is cookies and cream. This version -- all of the cupcakes at SweetCakes for that matter -- looked different than any other cupcakes I've run across. They have a square, block-ish type of look to the frosting. It's almost like the head of a hammer. I was worried there would be too much frosting, but that wasn't the case at all. It was balanced very nicely. This cookies and...

After a somewhat disappointing stop at Suarez Bakery last week, I gave Tizzerts a try this week. The two bakeries share a home at the Park Road Shopping Center. The display case was filled with delicious looking cupcakes. I bought three different cupcakes from Tizzerts. Strawberry Swizzle This one looked appealing. With pink white-chocolate shavings sprinkled on top of the pink frosting, it looks like a designer cupcake. It's a chocolate cupcake that's filled with strawberry pastry cream. The cupcake wasn't bad. It wasn't extremely moist, but it was soft and tasty. The frosting had a little bit of flavor to it, but what I particularly noticed is that it was the most silky smooth, creamy frosting I've ever had. If Cool Whip got together with butter and a little bit of pink food coloring, the Strawberry Swizzle frosting at Tizzerts would be the result. Salted Caramel Cupcake The cupcake was really, really savory. It was so good you could prob...

After a break from the sweetness last week, I'm back, sampling a few more of Charlotte's cupcakes. I went to Pineville and on the way back, driving North on Park Road, so I stopped in at Suarez Bakery . It's located in a strip mall at the Park Road Shopping Center. It's actually kind of hard to find because it blends in. I parked right in front of it, but had to look around for a while to find it. The name on the sign is a little bit faded, which doesn't help. The location is easy enough to get too, but from my experiences with the Park Road Shopping Center, it can be pretty crowded at times, so you may have to park and then walk a little to get to the shop. Suarez shares the shop with Tizzerts (can you guess which cupcake shop I'm going to try next week?). The Tizzert cupcakes do have a more artistic look than the Suarez cupcakes, but in case you can't tell which is which, they have signs in the display cases, indicating which bakery made the ...