Cupcake Camp

After a visit to the Woodland Discovery Playground this morning, the monkeys and I headed over to Cupcake Camp at the Agricenter. I was asked to judge, and how do you say no to free cupcakes?

The event is simple--enter cupcakes into the various contests, or pay $3 to come in and eat as many cupcakes as you want. All proceeds benefitted the Women of Style, Spirit & Success. These cupcake camps take place all over the country. This was the first year to have one in Memphis, and I can definitely see it becoming a wildly popular event.

The crowd today was pretty good. I'd guess 300-500?



The judging took place in a separate room. There were several categories including Best Memphis Theme:



and Most Unique Ingredient:



The categories I picked were Most Healthy (natch) and Kids (double natch). We had several things to consider while tasting.



Among the healthy contenders was a sad looking, but tasty carrot cake muffin, an inedible carob concoction, a white cupcake with chocolate pudding icing and a petite blueberry muffin/cupcake. The blueberry was my favorite, although I don't know if any of them were technically healthy.



The monkeys were hanging off to the side while I judged, but Jiro could only take watching for so long. He soon came over and appointed himself as my helper, which was just fine with me. He took our judging very seriously and declared the cookie dough cookie monster cupcake the hands down winner in the kids category.



Since our two categories had the least amount of entries, we got to sample some of the other cupcakes that were causing a buzz among the judges.

Behold the BBQ cupcake:



Yep that's pulled pork with a maple icing on top of a corn muffin. Amazingly, it was really, really good.

I had high hopes for the taco cupcake, replete with lettuce, sour cream, salsa, and cheese, but the corn/meat muffin was really dry.



All in all, it was a really fun way to spend a couple of hours. I enjoyed chatting with my fellow judges and I was thrilled to have Jiro by my side.