As cupcakery popularity rises, The JagWire picks out our favorites.

3 Women and an Oven

Although small and tucked away, the 3 Women and an Oven Boutique Bakery has many unique treats to offer customers. Even though the bakery has many decadent desserts to share, the JagWire decided to take a look specifically at their cupcakes.

Walking into 3 Women and an Oven, there was an automatic aroma of sweets. They have 12 different cupcake flavors daily along with delicious vanilla and chocolate baby cakes that are perfect for satisfying a sweet tooth.

Jayne Torline and Stacey Webb, co-owners of 3 Women and an Oven, started the bakery in May 2002 when they decided to share their love of baking and make baked-from-scratch desserts for friends and customers.

Preparations go on throughout the day at the bakery to keep the desserts fresh and enjoyable for customers. The baking manager starts at 6:30 a.m. preparing these desserts where steps are made to produce yummy treats.

“Because everything we make is from scratch, there are multiple steps and, depending on the recipe, we have multiple ingredients,” Torline said. “We work at keeping the recipes pure and use as many locally produced ingredients as possible.”

Besides the average customer, many businesses get to enjoy 3 Women and an Oven’s desserts and cupcakes as well.

“We have a variety of sales outlets: Walk-in businesses, phone orders, email orders, fax orders and several wholesale customers that also sell our desserts at their local locations such as Dean & Deluca, Nordstrom’s Espresso Bar, ingredient restaurant and several others,” Torline said. “You could say we have hundreds daily that enjoy our desserts.”

Cupcakes are starting to become a popular dessert and 3 Women and an Oven Bakery Boutique is definitely not the only bakery that offers cupcakes, but they do offer something that customers truly appreciate.

“There are several cupcake shops that have popped up over the past few years but our sales have also increased. Our customers tell us that they appreciate the fact that we do not use a box mix and they can truly taste the difference of a scratch made product,” Torline said. “Also we provide so much more than just cupcakes. We have talented cake artists that create amazing custom cakes for a variety of celebrations. We are coming up on graduation, and the creativity options are endless.”

Smallcakes

Smallcakes, a local bakery with three locations in Overland Park, Olathe and Lee’s Summit, was the JagWire’s favorite out of the three. Their slogan, “maybe a cupcake will help?” really makes them unique. We tried a dozen of the delectable cupcakes which are made from scratch every morning. Smallcakes features 15 different flavors daily and each cupcake is made with Shatto milk.

A few JagWire favorites were the birthday cake, lemon, pink vanilla and cookies and cream cupcakes. Smallcakes even had a peanut butter and jelly cupcake which was surprisingly good. No matter what flavor of cupcake, each was moist and seemed to crumble perfectly apart.

Aside from selling cupcakes, Smallcakes also offers birthday parties where kids and adults can decorate their own cupcakes.

We thought their prices were average at $3 per cupcake and $33 for a dozen. Smallcakes is our favorite cupcake place because of their great cupcakes and their short distance from home.

Gigi’s Cupcakes

Smells of sugar fill the air at Gigi’s cupcake shop in Overland Park. After a 15 minute drive and tons of traffic, we arrived at Gigi’s and walked in to the pretty tiny but very adorable store.

We tried the red velvet and one of the more unique flavors, key lime pie. The cute white chocolate heart on top of the red velvet added a nice touch. Baked fresh everyday these cupcakes smelled and looked nearly perfect, and the flavors in both of these were extremely strong. The key lime was very sour.

Gigi’s offers 33 flavors of cupcakes, all with adorable names like cherry limeade and lemon ice box but only offer around 10 per day which is disappointing if you are looking forward to a certain flavor.

Other flavors they bake include miss princess, midnight magic, chocolate malt and banana cream pie.

Their prices are very average compared to other cupcake places in the area, priced at $3 a cupcake. Overall Gigi’s would be a great place to stop by after school or just to get a sweet treat.