BERLIN – Chelsea, you are chocolate. Claim cappuccino, the East Village. Thank your Strawberry Fields, Central Park, for your flavor is strawberry.

Sorry, SoHo, but you are plain old vanilla.

These taste interpretations of four famous Manhattan neighborhoods come courtesy of German McDonald’s, which introduced cupcakes at many of its restaurants here on March 30. Although they are a staple of bake sales and birthday parties across America, cupcakes were all but unknown in Germany until recently.

To sell the unfamiliar treats to German consumers, McDonald’s chose to push its connection to New York, home to high-end cupcake shops like Magnolia Bakery, which even some Germans know from dubbed reruns of “Sex and the City.”

The cupcakes themselves were rather small for the price of $2.40, and cold from the refrigerated display case, which made the icing hard. The cake itself was dense rather than fluffy and more sweet than flavorful.

During a recent busy lunch hour at a McDonald’s in downtown Regensburg, none of the customers had cupcakes on their trays. Simon Forster, 26, an engineering student from the city, agreed to sample a cupcake of his choosing, purchased for him by The New York Times.

Mr. Forster, who stipulated that he had never “knowingly” consumed a cupcake but had seen them on television, bit into a chocolate Chelsea and gave a slight nod. “Not bad,” he said. Ultimately Mr. Forster judged the cupcake “a little artificial,” and said he would stick to the traditional Bavarian walnut pastries called Nussbeugerl.

Perhaps it would have gone better if he had taken the advice from the McDonald’s Web site, which recommended eating the chocolate cupcake by a harbor or a lake – or in Regensburg perhaps sitting by the Danube River running through town – to “enjoy your personal Chelsea feeling.”

In an attempt to give readers and potential eaters a better sense of what that Chelsea feeling might be, the German Web site gives an explanation far more likely to disorient them: “Chelsea was once terribly hip, then not again, and then once again it was. Was that too fast? Well, that’s New York.”

But McDonald’s chose not to venture into the outer boroughs for branding purchases, and does not offer de rigeur flavors like red velvet cake, which might have been a step too far from the traditional German palate.