As an unabashed lover of cupcakes, I was disturbingly excited to eat my fill at the Horace Williams Memorial Cupcake Festival hosted by the The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill on Friday.
If it's any testament to my riveting social life, I'm pretty sure that enjoying a wide array of delicious cupcakes would have been the highlight of my weekend. I didn't eat all day in preparation for the sugar-filled feast.
Just kidding. I ate a little bit, but reserved significant room for dessert.
But my dreams of baked good bliss were shattered when 25 minutes into the festival, the cupcakes ran out.
"We were petty overwhelmed," said Ernest Dollar, director of The Preservation Society. "Chapel Hill has demonstrated that they love this event...it tripled from the first year."
The festival, which doubled as a cupcake competition had 48 entries and more than 250 people in attendance. Lines were out the door, and parking was scarce.
The number of entries were double from what they were last year, and participants baked 300 of the tiny cakes for the apparently very hungry crowd.
"The competition was quite fierce," he said. Several professional bakers from the area submitted entries in addition to local cupcake neophytes.
In the end, Jan Yan's cupcake creation, "The Key to my Lemon Lime" won the hearts and pallets of the judges, which included the News&Observer's food writer, Andrea Weigl.
The winning cupcake was "really good," Dollar said. (I guess I'll just have to take his word on that.)
Tickets were sold for $5 and the event raised $1300 for The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill.
What began as a small birthday celebration for the late UNC philosophy professor more than seven years ago, has turned into quite the soiree.
"It has grown to this insane event, we’re very exited people in Chapel Hill enjoy cupcakes," he said.
Dollar said The Preservation Society will plan for more people and cupcakes when organizing next year's festival. I, on the other hand, will plan to get there at least a half hour earlier.
Read more about the Horace Williams Memorial Cupcake Festival in this week's Chapel Hill News.
Katelyn Ferral covers Orange County for The News & Observer and The Chapel Hill News.