The gourmet cupcake bubble should have burst -- long ago. For some reason, it hasn't. New bakeries claiming they specialize in cupcakes seem to pop up every month. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? How do you know which bakeries are selling desiccated supermarket cupcakes at inflated prices and which are selling rich, moist, freshly made wonders? Read on.

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Nanette Gonzales

Competitors in the 2012 L.A. Cupcake Challenge

[Update, 1:56 p.m.: The winners of the fifth annual LA Cupcake Challenge are My Delight (1st place), Cake Mamas (2nd place), Sweet Red Peach (3rd place).]

We've got no real excuse for this photo gallery except that it's Monday, and we love us some sweet food porn. Saturday afternoon, the L.A. Cupcake Challenge took over the Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood, where nearly three dozen local bakeries competed for top honors. The pictures (full photo gallery here) speak for themselves: It was a day of frosted combat, visual delights and sugar comas.

Magnolia Bakery

The NBA began its abbreviated season with more of a whimper than a bang, at least if you're a Lakers fan. (Note to David Stern: Maybe vetoing trades is a bad idea.) To console the hometown crowd -- who says sorrows cannot be managed by buttercream frosting -- Magnolia Bakery began fashioning Lakers cupcakes, available on game days.

But since the Lakers are not the only game in town anymore, the bakery has broadened the scope of their pastry kitchen's allegiances to include the Clippers. Because if you had a choice between watching Kobe try and dribble and shoot around the large Lamar Odom-shaped hole on the floor of the Staples Center, and watching the now nearly patented alley-oops between Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, what would you do? Okay, you don't have to answer that. At least not out loud.

Either way, you can now buy cupcakes for each team. Imagine how much buttercream frosting you'll get to eat when the Lakers and Clippers play each other. (Saturday, Jan. 14, 7:30 p.m.)

Guzzle & Nosh

Frosted death: Could these cupcakes have explosive frosting?

What happens in Vegas really does stay in Vegas, at least for one Massachusetts woman. Rebecca Hains tells WCVB-TV that a TSA agent in Las Vegas confiscated her frosted cupcake because he thought the icing on it could be explosive. Hains says she was told the frosting was "gel-like" enough to constitute a security risk. If MI6 can turn bombs into cupcakes, why wouldn't terrorists try to turn cupcakes into bombs?

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Magnolia Bakery

Lakers cupcakes

Lakers fans have had a tough time of it lately, between losing Lamar Odom to the Mavericks and Chris Paul to the Clippers and Kobe Bryant to the divorce court. About the only people who've been enjoying this are the folks at TMZ, who at least get to take the Khloe Kardashian show on the road. Things may get better before the season opens on Christmas Day, but if we don't all get a big Dwight Howard-sized present under (well, beside) the tree, we can at least drown our sorrows in buttercream frosting.

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R.E.~/Flickr

Cupcakes were one of the most Googled terms of 2011

Much to our chagrin, the cupcake is a trend that just won't die: according to Google's 2011 Year-End Zeitgeist, cupcakes were one of the most popular Food and Drink search terms of the year. Other fascinating revelations about our food-related search engine habits: everyone in the world was constantly on the hunt for pizza, and Canadians sure do love making pork tenderloins.

As it has done every year since 2001, Google analyzed the billions of the terms that we users typed into its search box in 2011, filtered out spam and constructed "lists that best reflects the spirit of the times." Most of the search terms are ranked by popularity, though a few lists reflect the "fastest rising" searches - that is, the most popular queries in a particular category are compared to their popularity last year, then ranked based on their increase in search volume.

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Goodie Girls

Los Angeles needs another cupcake shop like we need another stretch Humvee limo, but they keep littering the city, all the same. Goodie Girls, the first storefront from Cupcake Wars winner Annette Starbuck, opens November 20th in Glendale. She'll be offering over a dozen flavors including her signature variety, Pumpkin Pancakes, and her Cake Ups push pops.

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To promote the new season of zombie thriller The Walking Dead, which returns (minus executive producer Frank Darabont) for season 2, AMC shills are currently on the Third Street Promenade (near Arizona in front of the Coffee Bean) giving away free red velvet cupcakes. Sweet schwag! That's the kind of bribery we like. We're told they'll be there until 3 p.m. or util the cupcakes run out.

It would be more thematically appropriate to give away sweetbreads, wouldn't it, but not many tourists would go for that. Still, it would be fun to watch them take that first bite.

amazon

Just as we say we'd be happy to never see another cupcake book again, one lands on our desk that is oddly compelling. We say oddly, as we wouldn't even call The Butch Bakery Cookbook by David Arrick (with Janice Kollar) a particularly good baking book. But it is pretty hilariously entertaining-- though it seems less the book's intention than our interpretation of those sage bits of "manly" advice: "Baking isn't supposed to be stressful or hard work. You're making something delicious to eat, man. Enjoy the journey."

And then we read the very brief Introduction (this is more of a pocket guide to "boy baking" than a standard cookbook), in which Arrick says he started Butch Bakery because "no one had been catering to men and their particular tastes, making their [cupcakes'] look streamlined and to the point -- no flowers, no swirls, no sprinkles, just a delicious frosted cupcake." Well, he does have an excellent point, even if we consider that craving for cutesy-free cupcakes to be gender-neutral.

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Intoxicated Cupcakes: 41 Tipsy Treats, the latest in the recent onslaught of booze-drenched cake cookbooks, certainly isn't going after any James Beard awards. But it's summer. And so it's perfectly acceptable to have a strawberry daiquiri cupcake (p. 40) followed by a piña colada cupcake chaser (p. 27) guilty pleasure moment while you peruse those B list summer movie listings.

Of course, the cupcakes still have to be good.

If you're a from scratch-only baker, consider yourself forewarned that there are a lot of cake mixes and instant pudding mixes scattered about in those "Bright and Cheery Orange Raspberry Cupcakes" and "Tooty-Fruity Sangria Cupcakes." But cake mixes are perfectly understandable when you're using ingredients like "ready to drink" Mudslide mix in those chocolate Mudslide cupcakes with vanilla-Mudslide icing. And what makes a "good" cupcake is certainly a highly subjective matter.

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