Bill Addison

In the middle of a recent Friday afternoon, a perspiring trail of cupcake cravers zigzagged out the door at the new Sprinkles bakery in the Plaza at Preston Center. It wasn't PR spin after all: The rumors of long lines proved real. Sunlight reflected off the glass facade, obscuring the view inside and leaving first-timers like me to only imagine the sugary splendor awaiting them. The line creaked along painfully. No one budged.

Twenty-five minutes later, I made it inside. The blast of cold air was followed by hypnotic scents of vanilla and chocolate that wrapped themselves around me like the ghostly angels in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Japanese-inspired, minimalist design gave the place a distinctly adult edge. Very Beverly Hills, very Dallas.

A perky staffer handed me a flavor card detailing the day's cupcake options. I studied the 11 choices and decided on six. Another relentlessly cheerful woman rang me up. (Is being around cupcakes all day the secret to happiness?) Back at the office, I gingerly opened the box. Each diminutive dreamboat, so expertly glossed with icing, seemed primped for a photo shoot. No food ever looks so good that I don't want to eat it, but these babies certainly demanded pause for admiration.

And then? Then I took a bite. And another. And yet another. And what I tasted didn't much impress me. The dry cake of the vanilla version failed to resonate with any richness. Its cloying frosting made me wince. The cream cheese silkiness atop the red velvet cupcake had a pleasant sour twang to temper the sweetness, but the scarlet cake lacked any discernable cocoa flavor.

Milk chocolate, chai, lemon-coconut: None of them delivered that misty cupcake moment when you sink into childlike satiation. Surprisingly, the only one of the six flavors I really enjoyed was strawberry. Moist and imbued with an honest berry flavor, the cake and icing properly balanced each other.

People rave about these things, so I had to wonder: Was it a bad batch? Or was it me? Does feeling apathy about Sprinkles make me a cupcake curmudgeon?

The following week I returned to Sprinkles for another batch and gathered together the food mavens from the paper's Taste section. I watched the same sense of disappointment spill over their faces as they sampled the dry, overly sweet vanilla and the in-need-of-cocoa red velvet. We found the cake on the ginger-lemon variation to be rubbery. One person lamented over the odd graininess of the sprinkles on the dark chocolate cupcake.

With a group of us now scratching our heads, a larger question loomed: Where in Dallas could we go to quell an immediate yearning for a transcendent cupcake?

No confection of an answer easily presented itself. Many of the city's top-notch bakeries offer cupcakes by special order. La Duni requires at least 48 hours advance notice, and the minimum order is one dozen of the same flavor. Ditto for Frosted Art Bakery & Studio , though by fluke I got my hands on one of Frosted Art pastry chef Bronwen Weber's chocolate cupcakes with salted caramel and cashews. Serious and sophisticated, they warrant planning ahead.

Dallas Affaires occasionally has "baby cakes," its slightly larger version of a cupcake, for sale in the store when their bakers make extra. And a dazzling miniature vanilla cake layered with pineapple pastry cream, whipped cream and toasted almonds from Rush Patisserie in Deep Ellum had me fantasizing over what magic chef-owner Samantha Rush might work on an even teensier treat.

For leads on instant-gratification cupcakes, we solicited advice from readers through an online poll. Several comments directed us toward Society Bakery on Greenville Avenue. Our impromptu tasting panel found Society's coconut cupcake – with its wisps of toasted coconut, tangy icing and buttery aftertaste – unanimously appealing. Other flavors, like pink champagne and red velvet, weren't as compelling, though.

I swung by Tart on Lovers Lane, another recommended destination, one weekday afternoon and encountered a diminished supply of cupcakes.

"How recently were these cupcakes made?" I asked the woman behind the counter.

"I'm not sure," she replied. "I haven't worked since the weekend."

Sure enough, they tasted a bit stale. I'd be willing to give this spot another chance, particularly since I didn't indulge in its custom-designing cupcake bar.

And though we liked the supple white cake with a lemony zing from Panini Bakery, the old-school white fluff on top gave us instant sugar jitters. Maybe we could scrape the cream cheese frosting from the Sprinkles red velvet and plop it onto Panini's white cake?

I'll grant you that cupcakes are not meant to be overanalyzed: They're conceived as fleeting, fragile bursts of Americana bliss. But I'm still on the hunt for a cultured cupcake, easy on the saccharine levels, that can be snagged on an impulse.

Cupcake clues or comments? E-mail me at billaddison@dallasnews.com.