“Thanks for doing the cupcakes on such short notice. I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to get them done. I’m really happy with how they turned out,” said Holly. She was a new customer of mine. Women who buy decadent cupcakes on short notice generally fall into three camps: Emotional Eaters, Guilty Friends or Over-Compensating Bosses. I hadn’t quite pinpointed where Holly fit. She’d rushed into the shop first thing in the morning, asking if I could make her a dozen chocolate cupcakes – so my first instinct was to place her in the Eaters camp. She wanted a particular shade of burgundy-purple icing, even pulling out a Farrow and Ball colour swatch to clarify what she meant by “brinjal.” It was a rich saturated colour with more red and yellow undertones than one finds in aubergine. I fingered the swatch as I discussed whether I could recreate it with her. The way she took it from me and tucked it back into her purse made me think she must be an Interior Designer – a Boss, then. As she grabbed her purse to pay, I noticed shopping bags on the floor. There was one in particular that stood out. An elaborately wrapped present strained to fit inside a huge paper Coach bag –a Friend, then, trying to make amends for something. Usually it was a slight oversight, or perhaps too much clinginess, neediness, or selfishness that led Friends to her shop. I couldn’t help but think that clinginess, neediness, and selfishness did not generally lead to Coach purses, however, otherwise I would certainly have something more fashionable to sling over my shoulder.
“I’ll just grab a few of your cards, if you don’t mind?,” Holly asked, as I went through the production of boxing and wrapping the cupcakes. I’d chosen gold tissue paper to line the black box, and I was now pulling out lengths of satin ribbon in gold, purple and burgundy to tie around it. I took a great deal of care with the wrapping. If a customer was willing to pay upwards of three dollars for a cupcake, then I was prepared to make sure it looked pretty. It had been a sort of unofficial mantra of mine ever since I opened Topped with Sequins, my specialty cupcake shop, three years ago. At the time, friends had questioned the wisdom of having a cupcake shop that didn’t make mention of “sweets” or “cakes” or “sugar.” After all, that is what my main competitor, Susie’s SweetSugarCakes, had chosen when she launched her business in the same month as me. I was pleased with my choice. ‘Topped with Sequins’ was different, quirky even, and most importantly, it suited me. Each day I tried to live up to the name in some way. I decorated the cupcakes by hand, lavishly. I wrapped the cupcakes in intricate packaging, sourcing my ribbons directly from Germany. I dressed the part, too, going so far as to design custom t-shirts. It had been a bit narcissistic on my part at the beginning, but now the t-shirts were a nice source of extra income. Black, with a clingy feminine fit, they were slightly cheeky, which seemed to add to their appeal to a certain kind of woman. The design was not especially original: two cupcakes, positioned just so, with the name of the shop in pink cursive above them, glitter seeming to drip off the top of the pink lettering. Holly was standing right next to the t-shirt display, fingering my business card in much the same way I had handled her colour swatch.
“I guess you were destined to work with food, eh?,” Holly called to me. “With a name like ‘Kitchen’ how could you have done anything else?” I smiled the kind of smile that women give when they want to preempt predictable overfamiliar banter with people they’ve just met. “I bet you hear that all the time, right?” Holly had picked up on the smile’s significance. I wanted to sigh. I didn’t. Instead I launched into the standard forty-five second answer I give when asked about being a cupcake shop owner with the last name of ‘Kitchen.’ Step one: disarm with laughter and a wide smile. “It’d only be worse if it was ‘Sugar’!,” I answered, before explaining that the name was great at reminding me of where my love of food had begun, in the kitchen with my mom and grandmother. I honestly never thought that my surname would be such a big deal. Luckily, my best friend Sunita works in PR; she’s the one who told me to be prepared for the inevitabale question. When she told me that I was bound to get asked about my last name, I laughed. We had gone out for tapas at Prosecco, the restaurant whose owners seemed to have no geographic awareness whatsoever, to celebrate my small business loan. I thought she was teasing me. After all, my banker hadn’t commented about it, and he had asked every possible potential question I thought possible about my business. At that moment, I started mentally composing my answer to the question that has, I reckon, been asked at least four times a day since I opened the shop. It was even the first question posed by the woman sent to interview me for the newspaper’s yearly feature on woman entrepreneurs. Sunita was always encouraging me to take advantage of my genealogy. She had suggested “Kitchen’s Kupcakes” for the name of the shop. Obviously, I’d flatly refused. Now she was pushing the idea of a local cable cooking show with that title. She thought I should take advantage of my looks – namely the fact that I didn’t look like I spent all day surrounded by sweets premised on refined sugar. For Sunita, a sugar junkie of the highest order, the template for my Emotional Eater, my figure was a source of both envy and potential.
