RVA Cupcakes

There’s a lot of hyperbole about cupcakes. Depending on whom you ask, these single-sized portions of batter and icing can transport you to your grandmother’s idealized ’50s era kitchen, make you forget all of your recession-era woes in one decadent bite or single-handedly save a city’s local business economy.

The cupcake trend has been written up in the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. It’s earned its own reality show with TLC’s new "DC Cupcakes." And 10 years after Carrie ate a Magnolia Bakery cupcake on an episode of "Sex and the City" and inspired would-be Carries around the country to ditch their Diet Cokes for buttercream icing, the cupcake craze has finally reached Richmond.

"That’s just typical Richmond," laughed Sally Bell’s Kitchen co-owner, Scott Jones, when I ask him why it’s taken so long for Richmond to embrace the cupcake cult. "We don’t jump at the first fad."

Of course, Sally Bell’s Kitchen has been making cupcakes since before most Richmonders were born, but Jones’ comments were in reference to the newly omnipresent business model of the cupcake boutique. Cupcake bakeries have had tremendous success in cities like Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D. C. These are not your grandmother’s cupcakes.

LA-based Sprinkles Cupcakes, one of the forerunners of the cupcake bubble and self-proclaimed "world’s first cupcake bakery," offers ginger lemon, chai latte and gluten-free red velvet as flavor options. At Georgetown Cupcake, the basis for the show "DC Cupcakes," there’s salted caramel and white chocolate peppermint.

These are designer cupcakes that appeal to a new foodie generation, people weaned on shows like "Top Chef" and "No Reservations," who no longer blink at the presence of bone marrow on a restaurant menu. But at an average price of three dollars a pop, these cupcakes are also a mass-market product that can be appreciated by people who would never spend 200 dollars on a 15-course tasting menu.

Laurie Blakey, co-owner of the recently opened Pearl’s Cupcake Shoppe on Grove Avenue, said "a cupcake is something someone can indulge in and not feel guilty about."

And if the number of cupcake boutiques opened in the last two years is any indication, Richmond is a city that has been waiting for the chance to indulge. From Carytown Cupcakes to Frostings in Short Pump, Richmond has found itself newly inundated with gourmet cupcake boutiques. Like their big-city counterparts, these places offer unconventional flavor choices side by side with the vanilla and chocolate options so infused with childhood nostalgia. Among the rotating flavors on the Frostings menu are peanut butter pretzel and caramel latte.

At Two Sweet in Short Pump, one of the frosting flavors is coconut rum European meringue buttercream. Vegan or gluten-free alternatives are commonplace. These are bakeries so firmly embedded in the modern zeitgeist that they even appear on Facebook and Twitter.

"Social media is very important for a business like ours," admitted Blakey. "It helps us reach that younger demographic."

She plans to introduce fruit smoothies next spring in another attempt to tempt the hordes of school-age kids that frequent the Libbie and Grove area. While the younger generations in Richmond need to be lured by exotic flavor combinations or interactive social media, these same measures haven’t been necessary to win over those who remember a time before Facebook. Since it opened in March, Pearl’s best customers have been women 40 and older.

"Women over 60 will come into the store, see the German chocolate flavor and immediately buy it. There’s a nostalgia feel for them," remarked Blakey. At Carytown Cupcakes, co-owner Diane North responds without hesitation that their most popular cupcake is red velvet, a flavor so old-fashioned Southern that it makes key lime look cutting edge. These are local businesses that do their baking on site. They have small staffs. Many of them close whenever the cupcakes happen to run out that day.

Ultimately, the cupcake craze is a hip and modern gloss pasted on a quaint and old-fashioned idea. And while the modern premise of a gourmet cupcake boutique is relatively new to Richmond, the idea of a local bakeshop is as old as tobacco factories and Civil War monuments. Sally Bell’s Kitchen, a Richmond institution since 1924, is in many ways the living manifestation of that idealized grandmother’s kitchen many of these cupcake boutiques try to replicate, albeit with modern twists. Jones has seen increased sales in cupcakes since the current trend took hold, but the cupcakes themselves, and they way they’re made and sold, have been a part of his life for as long as he can remember.

"I’m 55, and I remember cupcakes from when I was 4 years old," he said. And according to Jones, the approach to cupcakes at Sally Bell’s has never varied. "We start by melting the chocolate to make the batter. We’ve been doing it for a long time. The best taste and the best value are always homemade."

If there’s a single word that links the decades old kitchen of Sally Bell’s to the gourmet cupcake boutiques of this era, it’s "homemade." This isn’t assembly line dining. This isn’t a month-old biscuit heated up in a microwave at a fast food chain. Whether it’s a salted caramel fondant extravaganza or simple vanilla, cupcakes and, by extension, the places that sell them, appeal to people on a sentimental level. The modern variation on the cupcake bakery may be new to Richmond, but the basis for it is older than all of us. The cupcake craze may be a 21st century trend, but it’s also a rediscovery of a way of baking and selling goods that has been there all along. 

• Sally Bell’s Kitchen is located at 708 W. Grace St. They can be reached at (804) 644-2838 or online at sallybellskitchen.com.


• Pearl’s Cupcake Shoppe is located at 5812 Grove Ave. They can be reached at (804) 285-2253 or online at pearlscupcakeshoppe.com.


• Carytown Cupcakes is located at 2820 W. Cary St. They can be reached at (804) 355-2253 or online at carytown-cupcakes.com.


• Frostings is located at 11331 W. Broad St. in Glen Allen. They can be reached at (804) 360-2712 or online at frostingsva.com.


• Two Sweet is located at 3422 Lauderdale Drive. They can be reached at (804) 360-4284 or online at twosweetrichmond.com.

Liz Jewett is a freelance writer who was born and raised in Richmond. She spends a little too much time thinking about and eating cupcakes. To learn more about Liz, visit http://lizramsay.blogspot.com, follow her on Twitter @lizj843, or run into her wherever cupcakes are sold.