Red Velvet Cafe

Red Velvet Cafe is a bakery with locations in Pickerington (the original) and Downtown Columbus. Come for the traditional cupcake offerings, and stay for the excellent sandwiches and coffee.

There are vegetarian and vegan items on the menu. The cafe is open seven days a week from breakfast to dinner. 

The cupcake flavors skew conservative with a rotating selection including German chocolate, banana cream pie, Buckeye (a.k.a. peanut butter-chocolate), carrot cake and apple cinnamon. Some less common choices include taro, made with taro cake, taro jam and taro buttercream, 

There are three vegetarian sandwiches for lunch and one for breakfast. The lunch panini options include a straight veggie, grilled cheese with avocado and Sriracha, and a traditional grilled cheese. The breakfast sandwich is made on ciabatta with roasted tomato, provolone cheese, spinach and egg.

The avocado Sriracha grilled cheese is a California style panini with Asian accents. It's rich, sweet, creamy and just about perfect.

The coffee bar is a treat. It carries selections from One Line in the Short North. There are a variety of international drinks offered from across the globe - Turkey, Vietnam, Cuba and more. Typically, a house bland and a single origin coffee are available.

SnickerDoodles Bakery/Cookies by Design

Even though the heyday of cupcakes has long since passed, it's always nice to find a talented producer like Snickerdoodles Bakery that can still elevate this childhood favorite with the skill of a craftsman. There is an adjacent cookie shop called Cookies by Design that operates out of the same kitchen. Between the two shops, something can be found to sate your sweet tooth.

The baker was passionate about her wares, and she explained that the cupcakes were vegetarian but not vegan appropriate. Many ingredients were locally sourced, including non-homogenized milk from a farm about 35 minutes from Mobile.

The Mississippi mud cupcakes were a brownie-like cake base flecked with Cookies by Design Oreos and crushed pecans. It was drizzled with caramel and chocolate syrup, and rich cocoa flavor exploded in each bite.

The turtle cupcake had salty pieces of crushed pretzel as a foundation. Caramel and nuts make the flavor sing.

The red velevet cupcakes with a liquid chocolate center add another layer of texture to a Southern bakery standard. The cake was moist, and the icing adds fat vanilla notes to what is a deceptive chocolate bomb.

The Elvis cupcake is banana cake topped in peanut butter icing. The King's favorite sandwich stands well as a baked good.

Overall, the appearance of the cupcakes is artful but lacking the sophistication of some of more talented icing pipers at other bakeries. This slight defect notwithstanding, everything I sampled tasted great.

Snickerdoodle

Vegan baker wins Cupcake Wars

Since I spend my spare time watching almost every competitive food program on television, I was particularly pleased when Chloe Coscarelli won Cupcake Wars on the Food Network. The vegan chef took the crown by preparing 1,000 cupcakes for a singles event, including a chocolate strawberry shortcake, a dark chocolate orange and a raspberry tiramisu. The theme of the ingredients was aphrodisiacs.

All we need is for a vegan chef to win Iron Chef America or Top Chef Master and vegetarian fine dining might get its due recognition. Much like Pattycake in Columbus, Chef Chloe demonstrated that vegan dessert can be more amazing than its non-vegan counterparts.