Gastronomical Exploration: Sweet Tooth Fairy

For my summer break, I've decided to go bakery-hopping; sampling pastries from bakeries all over Salt Lake City. There quite a few places I've never been to, and I'm pretty stoked about the possibility of finding a good pastry shop. Besides, it's always good to know what flavors, textures, and sweetness are considered the 'average' or the 'norm', and what I'll be competing against. All I need to do is make pastries that taste better than theirs, right? ;)

The first shop I visited was the Sweet Tooth Fairy.

A very cute little shop nestled amongst other retail stores in the Foothill Shopping center. As soon as I entered, the smell of baked goods, vanilla, and something sweet wafted out.

Then I spotted these guys--macarons! There was another place in Salt Lake other than Les Madeleine's or Grand America hotel that sells them! I quickly picked this one, and a cupcake--Coconut-Mango, one of their Flavor-of-the-Month special, and one that I've never seen in other shops before.

OK, first up, the Coconut-Mango cupcake. The cake itself felt soft and moist, but just by touching the frosting, I can already tell that it's no smooth, fluffy buttercreams at Diva's. It had that crusty surface charasteric of those shortening + powder sugar frostings on so many grocery store-caliber cupcakes.

Already dismayed, I carefully cut into the cupcake. I was quite impressed by how tender the cake was.

The cross-section. The cake was, again, very soft, tender, fine crumbed--texturally, it was excellent. But the flavor? The frosting had a nice, obviously mango and coconutty flavor; but it was over-the-top sweet. It felt like I was about to go into a diabetic coma, without having diabetes. Not only was the frosting unbearably sweet, but the cake was too sweet to for such a frosting; one should balance out the other. I couldn't finish it, and had to toss it out. At least it's cheaper than Diva's (Diva's cupscake is $2.50 for a regular. Sweet Tooth Fairy is at $2.35). But for a cupcake that tastes just like the ones at grocery store, not worth the price.

Now, on to the macaron...

...yet another hollow one. But I was still impressed by the fact that this Raspberry macaron tasted like...raspberry. It definitely lived up to its name. But so cloyingly sweet! The filling was some sort of a buttercream, I wasn't sure if the cream itself was flavored or not.

Hmmm...appearance-wise, I've made the exact same macarons. I actually feel relieved/encouraged by this...