Our friend Allison Martin is one of our favorite Franklin readers, and she was kind enough to gorge herself on cupcakes for the purposes of this review. Allison makes quilts on commission at her website, Threads of Hope – check it out!
Nashville isn’t the only city to experience a sudden influx of cupcake shops. South of the border in Franklin, we have our own tale of two cupcakeries: Ivey Cake and Curious Gourmet. What’s a Franklinite or visiting Nashvillian to do? Do you visit Curious Gourmet, the cupcake café on Main Street with a gorgeous kitchen appliance store (of the same name) next door? Or do you venture down to 4th Street, just past the Mercantile to the sweet, cupcake sized shop Ivey Cake?
Thankfully, I have a sweet tooth and was ready to try out both! Curious Gourmet Cupcakes was the first to arrive. Opening first with as a cupcakery, the store features a variety of cupcake flavors available daily like Devil’s Food, Dulche de Leche, Pretty Pretty Princess (vanilla cupcake with pink buttercream icing), and Vanilla Bean. They also have a list of over 20 cupcakes available on select days like Red Velvet, Pumpkin, German Chocolate Cake, Key Lime Pie and many more! Curious Gourmet also has breakfast cupcakes such as Banana Walnut, French Toast, Pecan Sticky Bun, and Lemon Poppyseed. Their cupcakes are $3.25.
Their shop is larger than Ivey Cake’s with tables to sit and enjoy your cupcake and a cup of their coffee. They also have beautiful counters and cabinets and use all the top appliances and kitchen tools which are sold at the Curious Gourmet kitchen store a few shops down.
Now, my rules about cake are hard and fast: the cake has to be good enough to stand on its own while the icing should be sweet, but not so sweet I can’t eat it all. I also don’t want to buy something that I could make, so the cupcake needs to taste original with a lingering flavor, not something I could make from a box. My first cupcake at Curious Gourmet was Red Velvet: my favorite cake. The cupcakes have as much icing as cake, so I was excited to take a bite. However, I found the cake to be a bit dry and the icing to be too sweet. I could only eat about half the icing. The taste was good, but similar to icing I would taste on a store bought cake. The cake was alright, but Duncan Hines’ box cakes I make at home are better. A few days later, I decided to give it another chance and bought the Devil’s Food cake only to have a similar experience. I was very disappointed.
About a month later, I noticed Ivey Cake tucked next to Franklin Mercantile. Ivey Cake is smaller, fun, creative, and very pink. If you want to sit to eat your cupcake, you have to slip into the Mercantile (the stores are connected). They aren’t open as often (mostly from 11-3), but they also make amazing custom cakes.
I talked with the owner, Ivey, and shared my frustrations about Curious Gourmet. She encouraged me to give her red velvet a try. Their cupcakes are $3.00 and the icing about half to two-thirds as high as Curious Gourmet’s. The cupcakes look like a beautiful version of what you might try to make yourself; they lack the polished sheen of Curious Gourmet. They’re also named things like Total Flake, Bad Kisser, Lucky in Love, The Rebel, and so on. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was willing to try something new. The red velvet cake, The Break-Up, was perfection! The cake was moist and rich, the perfect combination of chocolate and vanilla flavors. So good in fact that I even licked the delicious crumbs off the silver wrapper! The cream cheese icing was rich but since it wasn’t too high, it didn’t seem over-done. I’ve also tried The Rebel (German chocolate), Bad Kisser (chocolate with chocolate icing), and most recently, Big Dreams (strawberry with pink cream cheese icing). Not a single one has let me down. Big Dreams even came to Ivey in her sleep after a frustrating day of trying to find the perfect, most original recipe for strawberry cake. Definitely not Duncan Hines.
The only disappointment with Ivey Cake was trying to go on a Monday, finding the store closed, thus giving Curious Gourmet a third try with the Pretty Pretty Princess cupcake, and being sorely disappointed yet again with dry cake.
The final verdict: While Ivey Cake may be open less and is much smaller, they take the cake with their moist, memorable flavors and names, and absolutely delicious cupcakes! Next time you come to Franklin, swing by Ivey Cake for dessert and check it out yourself!
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