Deep fried cupcake. Deep. Fried. CUPCAKE!

On Friday afternoon, office buddy Dawn alerted me to the existence of the deep-fried cupcake from Kickass Cupcakes in Davis Square (a place I'd visited only once before, despite its relative proximity to home).

On Saturday morning, we were so there.

For future reference, this is what you need to make a deep-fried cupcake:



You got yer regular standard deep-fat fryer; yer necessary cupcake, of course; there's yer squeezy cream; and tucked in the corner would be yer bottle of chocolate sauce. Not shown is the bowl of light batter in which the cupcake is doused before frying.

Commence to drooling and/or dialing 9 and 1 and getting ready to dial 1 again.

While we waited for nature to take its course, we checked out the other cupcake options, which included pretty sparkles:



The Green Monster:



The S'mores:



And the, um, "Cheesy Catnip Kittycake," which I assume was not for human consumption.



And then our deep-fried cupcake was ready! Oops, no it wasn't; our server had switched on the fryer and thrown the cake in without giving the oil a chance to heat. I didn't even want to know what the result looked like.

She was very apologetic ("We don't usually start deep frying until the afternoon," she said), and soon had a second cupcake in and sizzling.

While we waited some more, we watched one of the bakers unwrap several three-pound blocks of butter—and when I say butter, I mean Plugra—top them off with a couple of wholesale-sized bricks of cream cheese, and set the whole thing to churning in a serious industrial mixer. That, my friend, is how you make frosting.

And then our server took a paper cone (genius, and the only possible way to present a deep-fried cupcake), swirled chocolate sauce into its base, placed the cake inside, added more chocolate sauce, and finished it off with a generous dollop of cream.

There's actually a deep-fried cupcake under here.



See?



In truth, it could have done without quite so much smothering; save for one small corner that had missed the chocolate-and-cream deluge, and was therefore still crisp and crunchy, the rest was a big, soggy fistful.

Not that it was bad, mind you. As things that are deep fried and loaded with fat and sugar go, it was a fine example of the form: sweet and warm and completely indulgent, halfway between hot doughnut and deep-fried Twinkie.





We ate it walking down the street, our faces smeared with chocolate syrup and cream. It's not something one can consume delicately or with any pretense of sophistication. It's also something best shared; a whole one may just finish off a healthy person of average size.

And then it was gone, and we were left with a slightly heavy taste of cooking oil on the tongue. I'm not sure whether the solution would be to change to a lighter oil, or to allow the cake to drain a little before serving, or just to crank the heat up higher to make the cooking time as short as possible; that might be something to work on.

Davis Square has few options for state-fair-like indulgence, with the exception of the Belgian sugar waffle at Mr. Crepe or a scoop of maple-walnut from J.P. Licks (and even there you can almost legitimately claim there are healthy choices; hey, strawberry ice cream has fruit!).

So now there's something else to add to the list of heart-stopping goodies, though note that Kickass only does deep-fried cupcakes Friday through Sunday. Maybe it's for the best.