Hello Cupcake

Hello Cupcake is Dupont Circle’s answer to the cupcake phenomenon that drove America wild about five years ago. Sure, sometimes trendy items take a while to reach Washington, D.C., but it was only a matter of time before a store advertising buttercream frosting would entice and beckon Dupont passers-by to stop in for a cupcake.

Oddly reminiscent of the famed Los Angeles’ Sprinkles Cupcakes, Hello Cupcake offers comforting cakes-in-a-paper-cup smeared with four inches of buttercream. For $3 a cupcake you can choose from any assortment, depending on what is selling that day and what is still available when you walked in. Hello Cupcake’s “original” flavors of chocolate or vanilla cake with corresponding frostings would be its winners, followed by “you tart!” lemon with lemon frosting, carrot with cream-cheese frosting and gianduja (like Nutella in cupcake form).

Its other flavors include peanut butter blossom, peppermint penny and raspberry beret, among others, which are usually either chocolate or vanilla topped with peanut butter, mint or raspberry frosting. There's also vanilla gorilla, which is banana cake and cream cheese frosting, triple coconut, and Dulce du leche, which is caramel cake and dulce du leche frosting.

After a while, you'll notice that the flavors consist of mixing-and-matching frostings and cake to be called something new (for example, Velvet Elvis takes the vanilla gorilla's banana cake and frosts it with the peanut butter blossom top). The flavors rotate on a daily schedule. Buy four, six or a dozen and you get a cute bakery box with it with special cupcake holders inside.

Even as a grown-up, you enter feeling like a little kid at a, well, cupcake shop, eyeing the mounds of frosting and trying desperately to make this big flavor decision. Hello Cupcake, however, is not exactly the friendly neighborhood cupcake shop you’d expect with bright smiling cashiers and workers happily handing out baked goods.

When busy, there’s a lack of an efficient system when it comes to ordering at the counter, causing some customers to be served before others and resulting in a lot of grumbling and irritated people who just want a cupcake. Others have described Hello Cupcake to being run more like the Krispy Kreme across the street than a fancy bakery. In addition, there’s no room for negotiation if you buy, say, a hundred or more for a wedding, as would be expected from any other bakery.

Despite its trendy, soothing colors and its display case of mouth-watering treats to boost you up when you’re down, it’s always a slightly tense, harried experience just to get a cupcake. However, you can always take your cake and eat it, too, on the lawn in Dupont Circle.

- by Rin-rin Yu, Washington Reporter for HelloMetro  (Click to leave a message)

Rin-rin Yu

Rin-rin is an award-winning writer and journalist based in the Baltimore-Washington area. Her work has appeared in China Daily, DAYSPA magazine, Luxury Home Design, Aquatics International, Not For Tourists and other publications. Rin-rin has also worked for ABC News, WHDH-TV (NBC) in Boston and Hanley Wood Business Media. She has a master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She is an avid world traveler and maintains a travel blog, www.mytravelhats.com.