Alpine Bakery, Concord

Cupcakes tried: chocolate with fudge frosting, vanilla with vanilla frosting, chocolate with mocha mousse, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, mango vanilla cake with mango mousse and shredded coconut
Also tried: variety of pastries

Overall reaction: Grocery store upscaled

These cupcakes were courtesy of my friend Lesley who was buying pastries for a baby shower and noticed that they also sold a variety of cupcakes. And, voila, she picked some up for me. Many thanks Lesley!

Their pastries were quite yummy...apple turnovers, cookies with fillings and other such danishes. However, the cupcakes left much to be desired. What a bummer!

Both the vanilla cupcake with vanilla frosting and the chocolate cupcake with fudge frosting were your typical grocery store cupcake. Slightly better but not by much. They were a little dry and the cake was rather bland. The vanilla cupcake was reminiscent of a Twinkie, it tasted almost exactly like one. I think I'd rather have a Twinkie though.

The chocolate mocha mousse cupcake was the same exact cake as the chocolate, so see above for description. The mocha mousse topping was actually quite delightful, light and fluffy.

Everything nice except sugar and spice describes the carrot cake. The cake was bland and it just lacked all those great cinnamon and nutmeg flavors of a really good carrot cake. The cream cheese frosting was decent.

The worst cupcake of the bunch was the poor mango vanilla cake. Same exact cake as the vanilla, so see above for description. The mango curd filling was actually pretty good, but the mango mouse on top with the shredded coconut was awful. For some reason the mango and the coconut turned on each other and created a disaster of a combination.

My words of advice: They are obviously better at making pastries, so stick to that.