Dessert Duel: Icing On Top vs Not Just Desserts

We sampled tarts and cupcakes by two dessert catering services, Icing On Top and Not Just Desserts, to find the one with a sweeter score.

Icing On Top
If you find yourself at a dessert buffet catered by Ayushi Shah’s Icing On Top, leave the mini cupcakes and grab the mini tarts. Both bite-sized offerings are tiny enough to qualify as petit fours. The tarts—the walls of which were firm enough to hold in our fingers without breaking, yet crumbled fairly quickly in the mouth—are available in flavours such as double chocolate, Black Forest, peanut and caramel, red velvet, passion fruit and Opera (a coffee-flavoured tart). Our picks of the tarts are the peanut and caramel, made up of a layer each of gooey dark chocolate, rich caramel, and peanuts; the tangy, seed-speckled passion fruit; and the sinfully rich double chocolate. Shah’s cupcakes however didn’t taste as good as they looked. We found their pretty frostings, garnished with sprinkles and cupcake pearls, to have cavity-inducing levels of sugar, and the cake beneath the creamy swirls too dry. The Oreo, lemon, and vanilla cupcakes were cloying, while the moist and judiciously sweetened double chocolate cupcake and red velvet cupcake with cream cheese frosting, were the best of the lot. Prices start at Rs25 for mini cupcakes.
Icing On Top offers home delivery against a minimum order of a half-kilo cake or a box of a dozen cupcakes or a box of six tarts. Orders have to be placed two days in advance. To place an order, call 98670 13315. Orders can be picked up from 27 Kazi Sayed Street, Masjid Bunder, opposite the Hira Mistan Sweet Shop, near Masjid Bunder Station.

Not Just Desserts by Sabina
Icing on Top’s Shah, and the mother-and-daughter duo of Sabina and Mitali Gupta, the pastry chefs behind home-run bakery Not Just Desserts, ought to exchange notes. While the former has a winning recipe for mini tarts, the latter are cupcake experts, at least on the basis of the flavour we tried. (Because they only deliver boxes of assorted flavours for orders over two dozen, we opted for their bestselling Nutella cupcake). We didn’t care much for Not Just Desserts’s mini tarts, because they had thick and hard pastry shells, and the fillings, such as lemon, mixed fruit, peach, and chocolate, were over-sweet. The decadent Nutella cupcakes, on the other hand, were moist and topped with generous swirls of the glistening chocolate-hazelnut spread. You also get a taste of Nutella in each bite of the cake. The result is hard-to-resist gooey richness that’s so good we’d call this a worthy contender for the title of the city’s best cupcake. Prices start at Rs40 for cupcakes.
Not Just Desserts offers home delivery against a minimum order of a half-kilo cake or a box of a dozen cupcakes or a box of 20 tarts. Orders have to be placed a day in advance. To place an order, call 022 2418 0655 or 93262 00567. Orders can be picked up from 20/5, Podar House, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, Wadala.