Colibri, Beijing
I’m naturally attracted to cupcake stores, so when we passed by Colibri in Sanlitun Village I held everyone else up so I could peruse the flavours. The store is larger than your average cupcake store, with plenty of seating space and floor to ceiling windows. It looked fresh and modern.
We didn’t stay long. I had to make a quick selecting from their already dwindling supply. I came home with mocha, green tea, apricot, and double chocolate cupcake. They had great little cardboard boxes to pack them up in, and we were on our way.
I loved that the cupcakes were a little bit different. There was often a combination of toppings: icing piped round the outside with some king of centre filling. I’m tempted to try it with a few flavours. There wasn’t a standard design for the icing, each flavour seemed to have something different. On looks alone I’d rank them reasonably high. They were eye catching, and each one had it’s own defining features.
Unfortunately they didn’t quite live up to expectations. We all found each of the cakes very dry. They’re quite big cakes that are a little sparse on icing. There were also a few flavour combinations that didn’t quite work. The mocha was good in principal, but while the icing was coffee and chocolate the cake was a regular vanilla cake. I’m a stickler for cupcakes matching their chosen flavours. If you’re calling something a chocolate cake, the cake should be chocolate in some way. You can’t rely on your icing to carry you.
