I wanted to take a moment and recognize the grief and pain that many families are feeling in the wake of yesterday’s tragedy at Fort Hood. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families. With sincere gratitude and respect for their service and sacrifice,

-CakeLove

Thank you to everyone who voted for CakeLove as Best Bakery in the Washington Post Express readers’ poll! The results are announced today and I’m very happy and proud to say THANK YOU for voting for CakeLove!

We also took runner-up for Best Cupcake which we’re very happy and thankful to win as well!

As a token of our appreciation, please check out our ad in Express today! We’re celebrating with dollar cupcakes Friday and Saturday for walk-in customers! Get yellow or chocolate cupcakes dipped in ganache and topped with a swirl of vanilla buttercream! (limit 2 per customer).

And- even better- save 10% thru the online store when you enter the coupon EXPRESS at check out–good for purchases made this weekend only. Now’s the best time to buy for Thanksgiving!

Thanks again for supporting CakeLove, serving cake @ room temp, loving that Nothing is Fat Free, and embracing old school, all natural baking from scratch. We’re proud to be your bakery!

Cheers,

Warren

Thanks to everyone who voted CakeLove in the Wash Post Express readers poll. We were kindly nominated by YOU for Best Bakery and Best Cupcake. Thanks for voting—we’re patiently waiting for the results which will be announced Nov 6th!

Thank you!

Looking for a good time?

If so, then check out the first comedy festival sponsored by bightestyoungthings.com

http://www.brightestyoungthings.com/featured/bentzen-ball-opening-night-w-patton-oswalt/

it’s a full on comedy festival this weekend right here in DC on U Street!

I’m gonna check out the line-up at the Studio theater.  Here’s a link to the schedule.

http://www.bentzenball.com/saturday/

Have fun!

Hi everyone -

Please take a sec and vote for CL for best cupcake at

www.expressnightout.com

please VOTE before Oct 16th!

And while you’re there vote for Lebanese Taverna, too, for best restaurant/take away!

Thank you!

Got a couple of comments in person and on the blog about pursuing sugar free baking on why we’re doing it and is it true to our ideals. They’re fair questions and I understand the questions and the nature of them so let me share some thoughts…

Sugar free products are definitely something people have been asking for–for years really. I wrestled with the matter of whether or not to produce items that possibly use ingredients that aren’t in line with the core CakeLove mission- to bake with all natural ingredients. While I will never stray from that principle for our traditional products, everyone needs love and for CakeLove to ignore, disregard, or look away from this large sector of the population isn’t very genuine on our part and is a bit shortsighted for any business. We want people to enjoy desserts and believe that with enough information our customers can make an informed choice about what type of product they’ll purchase. It’s a change that we’re happy to embrace and look forward to greeting people who need to manage their blood sugar with treats that look and taste great!

We’re on the path for R & D and hope to have products available this fall. Thanks!

Lots of questions and requests for low to no sugar items. I hear ya and just wanna say I hear ya.

There are a lot of synthetic sugar subsititutes out there which taste great but don’t sit well on the stomach. They lead to lots of gas. Lots of it. So we’re having a look at agave syrup again and stevia and a few other new(er) substances that might work well or well enough to make a cake taste good and feel like a cake. So often the battle isn’t just for taste, it’s to achieve the same texture that comes with using real sugar.

People close to me have diabetes II and/or are hypoglycemic so I have motive to come up with the recipes. Since this is a business though it has to be viable and meet a demand. When we launched low sugar a few years back most customers just skipped it and went straight for the real thing. Maybe times are different???? We’ll see in a few weeks to months when we re-introduce a sugar alternative cake and/or frosting. I’ll post up info before that happens…

Thanks!

Due to rising demand of the gluten free cakes and cupcakes and the vegan cakes and cupcakes we’re going to make them available for order via the online store very soon. We strive to have both types in stock in each bakery but it seems like the requests are well ahead of the supply. I think we got kind of tunnel vision or skewed vision since when the product lines launched they started off really slowly (in 2006 well before the mass media talked about vegan or gluten free).

Anyway, online ordering will require what seems like a long lead time for CakeLove of 4 days, but it’s necessary b/c there are a lot of adjustments and special ingredients we have to source for each product line. We’ll route all ordering of GF and Vegan orders to the online store by the fall, except for walk-in cupcakes which, like now, could suffer from selling out perhaps before the shop closes for the day.

Thank you!  

Dogs Days - the annual sidewalk sale in Mid City - took place this past weekend. It was a lot of fun. The city didn’t offer the sales tax discount, but that didn’t stop the people from strolling around. We offered a buy 3 get one free special. Let me tell you it’s like people only saw 3 types of cupcakes

Red Velvet

Salty Caramel

Mud Cream

Blueberry

I’m like, doesn’t anyone know that we make other flavors? Anyway, it was fun and we’ll continue to have these flavors, and more.

Hey there- -

Thanks everyone for your passionate views and opinions about parking and driving and cars along U St. I approved/posted about all of the comments except those in Russian that I’m guessing are just porn spam.

A whole bunch of people insist that more cars are bad for DC. Pollution, congestion, stripping the neighborhood of personality. More are convinced that more parking isn’t what the neighborhood needs, either. And a few suggest widening the sidewalks to make more walkways, even closing the street for everyone to walk east-west at night.

I understand and really like the density argument: more people walking will bring success for street level retail shops, these are my core customers, and traffic robs a neighborhood of potential. A lot of the customers that shop in Mid-city are walkers, but not everyone, and this city doesn’t have the density of Manhattan everywhere. Do we really need 1,500 new parking spots, probably not, but couldn’t the Mid-city merchants use more? I appreciate the feedback, but I invite people to ask other businesses if they could drop their driving customers as quickly as the mood suggests in the comments submitted. Drivers matter, too, for a urban environment to thrive.

Road construction is coming soon, too. I think it’s in 2011 that dDot will carve up U St block by block and redesign it with wider sidewalks, narrowed lanes, bike lanes… all the bells and whistles that are being asked for. I think it’s great, for the walkers, for the bikers, and everyone. I hope it doesn’t put merchants out of business like it did with the Metro construction on U St or like down on P St in Dupont West End during their road renovations. dDot is assuring that lessons learned over there will be applied in this project. Maybe anything else learned in the Adams Morgan redevelopment will be applied, too.

A couple of people think that using metro is more time efficient than driving–that I just have to respectfully disagree with. Metro is good at some things, but in the few times I’ve taken bus or metro since the last post just because it was easier, it’s just a lot slower. Time isn’t the most important thing in the world and public transport obviously is a fantastic institution that we need more of, but it doesn’t work the same for everyone and sometimes it’s not the best choice.

Thanks for your comments,

WB