Dinner and Ice Cream AND Cupcakes

My brother and sister-in-law Ken and Mindy are fairly serious foodies and took us around to some great places when we were in Seattle. Our first night there we ate dinner at Tilth. They specialize in organic New American cuisine served small plates style and were named one of the NY Times' best new restaurants of last year.


Even though the restaurant is housed in a renovated cottage and we sat outside on the patio, Tilth is probably the fanciest restaurant I've been to. When N and I go out to eat we tend to frequent ethnic dives or if it's a special occasions we'll go to a schmancey steak house (I adore a good steak). But this was my first experience with fine cuisine served small plates style and it was great.

We had the Chilled Walla Walla Onion Soup, Sweet Corn-Yogurt Flan, St. Jude Albacore Tuna, Mini Duck Burgers, and the special which was Artichoke Ravioli. The food was delicious and delicate and gorgeous. (I had my camera with me but was sadly too shy to get it out for pictures.) My favorite dishes were the Onion Soup (the house-smoked salmon in it was great) and the Artichoke Ravioli.

After dinner we walked down the block to Molly Moon's Ice Cream where we split scoops of salted caramel and balsamic strawberry ice cream (both delicious). As we ate our ice cream we continued our impromptu dessert stroll and walked further down the street to Trophy Cupcakes.

I had first heard about Trophy Cupcakes on Not Martha and had filed it away as a fun place to try if I was in town. Ken and Mindy had been there before and liked it so we made it the third and last stop on our grand gastronomic walking tour of the Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood. (On the way there we discussed how the walking part of the evening conveniently and completely balanced out the ice cream and cupcake part of the evening.)

There were so many delicious-looking flavors that choosing was hard, but they were $3.50 a piece (and we had just had dinner AND ice cream) so we picked out a Pineapple Upside Down cupcake and a Snickerdoodle cupcake and cut them into fourths so we could each taste both. They were both fantastic. The flavors of both the cake and the frosting were rich and creamy and surprising like their namesakes. There were pineapple slices at the bottom of the Upside Down cupcake and the top of the Snickerdoodle cupcake even had the same texture as a Snickerdoodle cookie. I have no idea how they pulled that off but it was great.

I didn't try the Red Velvet flavor but I thought they looked adorable.

The next day Mindy and I stopped by the University Village mall to do a little shopping and uh, what do you know?--Trophy Cupcakes' only other store is located there! I'm not one to ignore a sign from fate so we went and brought back a few more cupcakes to share with the guys: Strawberry Cheesecake, Coconut, Triple Chocolate, and Vanilla Chocolate. It took us a few days to eat them all so the the chocolate flavors were kind of stale when we got to them. But the Strawberry Cheesecake and the Coconut flavors were fantastic. I would recommend those and the Pineapple Upside Down and Snickerdoodle flavors if you ever go.

And if you're ever in Seattle, you should really go.

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