These days, it feels liks Seattle has almost as many cupcake vendors as coffeeshops. But within the city borders, Yellow Leaf owns the art of cupcake making. Yellow Leaf uses Italian buttercream frosting—great ribbons of it whipped so fluffy and light you can finish a three-inch-tall mini-Eiffel Tower of the stuff and still feel like you have room for the cake below.

Yellow Leaf will throw just about anything into a cupcake mold: tomato soup, beer, mojito mix, wasabi, bacon. We have yet to come across a combination that doesn’t work in some way. The pancakes-and-bacon cupcake is the breakfast of every kid’s dreams, with a light maple syrup tinge to the frosting, a cupcake that indeed tastes like pancake batter, and just the right amount of tiny bacon bits in the cake and sprinkled on top. The “Neapolitan” is picturesquely literal, with three different cake flavors and three different frostings perfectly sectioned out in one cupcake. And if you’re not up for a white-chocolate-and-wasabi adventure, even something simple like a vanilla cupcake with vanilla frosting and shavings of white chocolate will ruin other cupcakes for you for a while.

The small shop doesn’t have much room to sit down, but with its warm yellow walls, lovely presentation of the day’s selections, and decent coffee, it is one of Belltown’s most pleasant spots to refuel.