Cupcake Royale is by far Seattle’s most successful cupcake shop—it’s a chain, and the sheer turnover in one shop is impressive. The cupcakes sure are pretty, with signature swirls of gooey butter cream atop cakes that fan out into egregiously wide hats. They’re pretty good, too. Cupcake Royale sources local and organic ingredients, and recent efforts to make the cakes “moist-ier” have worked: they make the best cakes out of all the cupcake shops and the quality of these never varies from day to day or branch to branch. These creations are the closest thing to the best of the mom-made birthday treats so many remember fondly.

What these cupcakes lack, however, is depth. The frosting is overpoweringly sweet, and with the exception of the interesting seasonal concoctions (e.g., spicy Mexican-chocolate frosting for cinco de mayo) all of the frostings tend to taste the same whether they’re pastel purple or orange or pink. Of the regularly featured cupcakes we like the salted caramel (a lot of salt to balance out a lot of sugar) and the carrot cake (cream cheese frosting) varieties the best.

Cupcake Royale does have cute shops, though, particularly the Capitol Hill branch, which looks like it was jointly designed by a princess-obsessed six-year-old and a concrete-obsessed hipster. These are actually full coffeeshops, complete with good beans and laptop junkies.