When my cousin was here visiting for a short weekend, she requested that we get cupcakes. I can accommodate that request! She went to LA winter and visited Sprinkles and well, I wasn’t going to take her to Sprinkles anyway when there are so many local shops to visit in San Diego. I decided on trying out Pure Cupcakes in Pacific Beach since I remember it was a highly rated cupcake from our Red Velvet Cupcake crawl (Faye, don’t cringe, okay).
It was later in the day so they didn’t have a ton of cupcakes left. Booooo. They didn’t have a lot of the more fun looking flavors that I had seen on their website. We ended up getting a few to share.
That’s all that was left!
[pure’fetti cupcake / $2.75]
My cousin requested the Funfetti cupcake – a vanilla bean cupcake with confetti candy and a vanilla buttercream frosting (and more sprinkles). Jake, S and my cousin all said this was their favorite (I know, I had to be the odd girl out on this one). It was moist, and the buttercream was perfect – light, creamy, sweet but not tooth-achingly sweet. It had a nice crumb, too.
[tiramisu cupcake / $3.25 (specialty price)]
My requested cupcake was the Tiramisu – an espresso soaked vanilla cake and a mascarpone frosting and dusted with dark cocoa and chocolate shavings. This ended up being my favorite one! I really liked the flavor of the espresso/coffee that was in with the vanilla cake and I liked the sweet, creamy, slightly tangy mascarpone frosting on top. I liked that this was a vanilla cake, too! I was expecting it to be chocolate for some reason.
[red velvet / $2.75]
Jake’s request? Red velvet. Like it would be anything else. It tasted pretty good, similar to when we had it before. I like how they dust one edge of it with red velvet cake crumbles.
[chocolate cupcake and peanut butter cupcake / $2.75 (not sure on the mini price!)]
S. picked out a regular chocolate cupcake and the tiny one is a Peanut Butter one (I didn’t see the name of this one on the menu though, I think we got the last one). The chocolate one was a super rich, very chocolatey cake. I knew from ONE bite that Jake would not like it – it was a cupcake for true chocolate fans! It was almost too sweet for me and we ended up letting S. devour most of it.
I don’t really remember the what the mini one was like, honestly. I guess that means I’ll have to go back and do more research…
They serve their cupcakes on bamboo plates which I think are so cool.
Overall I do really like their cupcakes – they’re not too sweet, they are moist and they have great frostings. I really hope I can swing by here and catch them when they have more of their fun sounding flavors in the shop! Too bad they don’t have a cupcake calendar so you know what they’re making on what day!
Pure Cupcakes
1772-A Garnet Ave.
San Diego, CA 92109
858-274-CAKE
Ooh these look yummy! The chocolate cupcake looked so pretty with the pearl sugar. The tiramisu sounds so good – I’ll definitely have to try that 🙂
I love the pearls on the chocolate one – so cute! Hopefully they have more of the other flavors the next time I visit.
The chocolate cupcake looks the best. I’m not a fan of frosting but it looks mousse-y to me on that one. I wonder why your cousin requested cupcakes for her visit (it wasn’t b/c of the Sprinkles in LA was it) ? I wonder if her city doesn’t have as many cupcake places as SoCal? Most ppl who visit SD usually asks for Mexican food. So I wonder if SoCal is becoming a cupcake destination for visitors (they should have your Red Velvet Crawl on the SD tourism site – seriously).
She requested cupcakes because she really likes cupcakes haha. She lives in a little town in New Hampshire so I don’t think they have as many bakeries! She asked for Mexican food, too. I think Jake and I should do travel tours for out of towners!
TC and I went here shortly after the epic RV cupcake taste off…nice ladies here but the flavors offered (or left) that day were not the more exotic ones. They have a lot more interesting flavors on their website but they rotate their flavors or something.
Hmm maybe you have to get here earlier in the day to see the special flavors. It seemed like they ran out of a lot of flavors.