The Queen of Cupcakes

“Cupcakes are the new wine,” Tripp observes, “and everyone is talking about their texture and sweetness.  The bar is placed very high.  To set yourself apart, you can’t just have the same chocolate in every cupcake.  And I get bored, too.” Like grapes to a vintner, recipes are Tripp’s stock-in-trade. Customers want Wednesday’s Willie Vanillie to taste exactly like Saturday’s, yet “there are so many random factors like humidity and temperature” affecting the consistency of baked goods, she says.  Her friend’s vanilla cake recipe tasted heavenly, but the airy, spongy dough jumped all over the pan.  “I ended up throwing half of every batch out,” she says.  When she tried changing it, “people came back in, irate.”  In short order, she reinstated the original flavor.

“Everyone thinks the baking business is glamorous,” she says, “but the hours are horrendous.”  A typical day actually starts the evening before between 9 and 10 pm when Tripp pre-measures the dry ingredients into buckets with lids.  Based on orders, experience, and her precision skills as an architect, she estimates what volume of each flavor she needs. “In architecture, you miscalculate, and a building can fall over,” she says.  “Here, you forget the baking powder and your cupcake falls.”

 She grabs her zzzs between 10 pm and 5 am--or as early as 2 a.m. before a particularly busy day or holiday.  When her alarm goes off, she cringes, then races to her off-site kitchen for four hours of nonstop baking. The chronic sleep deprivation reminds her of early motherhood.  “But now I’m 50!” she sighs.

On bad days, when she oversleeps and has to go into overdrive, she worries that she’s not cut out for this work.  Bleary-eyed, she risks leaving out crucial ingredients.  “Don’t forget the eggs” say post-its around the kitchen.  Meltdowns are not unusual.  One evening she tripped and dropped a huge bowl of sticky chocolate ganache all over the floor.  It took many hours of misery to scrape up that expensive mistake.  Another night the power went off and she couldn’t bake a single cupcake.  “I just sat down and cried and said to myself, ‘Maybe I should have stayed in architecture. ‘”  But hours later, the electricity came on,  the stove fired up, and after her pity break, she got back to business.  The store opened three hours late but she filled all her orders.