Crumbs Cupcakes

I found myself in the baking aisle of target the weekend prior to my nephews birthday. At perfect eye level was a beautifully packaged box of Crumbs "Happy Birthday" cupcake mix staring me down. With its premium price tag of $9.99 per box that yielded 1 dozen buttercream frosted cupcakes I realized that this mix was not for the faint of heart. I had never baked cupcakes for any of my kids events. This was partly due to a shortage of time balancing my schedule and a fear of serving fallen, sloppily made, poorly constructed cupcakes for my children's birthdays. That fear of failure rearing its ugly head. I decided that since it was my nephews birthday and not a venue where too many people could see my fail that I would take the plunge and bake.

Had I known what I was getting myself into I would not have purchased the mix. 4 sticks of butter, 10 ounces of cream cheese and about $40.00 later found myself in my kitchen at 7am ready to bake. The instructions were fairly simple to follow and broke the process down into about 4 steps over a 3 hour time period. The recipe required three different types of frosting, one was for the rosettes that were to be used to decorate the cupcakes. I had a lot of fun baking the cupcakes and the the end result was quite positive; not the epic failure I had imagined.

Part of what motivated me to try this cupcake mix was to evaluate how a high end bakery could enter the baked good mix market. The average cupcake mix yielding 24 cupcakes cost about $2 at target and frosting seemed to add an additional $3 to the cost with a total baking time of about an hour. I'd be interested to see how Crumbs fares in this category as I would imagine that people with this level of discretionary income's time per hour would be high enough that they would be better served to spend the $80 on 24 customer cupcakes from a specialty bakery not taking into account the "experience" factor baking a crumbs cupcake.