We were closed and always delivered our leftovers to homeless shelters. “One night while my wife was pregnant, she wanted a cupcake. We close at 9 p.m., but a lot of people want a cupcake at midnight or 1 a.m.,” he says. “I’ve always been enamored with buying things from machines. In 2012, they introduced the world’s first Cupcake ATM, which allows customers to buy cupcakes 24 hours a day. With an eye toward innovation, the Nelsons launched the world’s first cupcake truck, the Sprinklesmobile, in 2009. She also can be seen as a judge on Food Network’s Cupcake Wars. Charles serves as president while Candace is the chief creative officer and public face of the company. The brand has grown to include ice cream, cookies, cupcakes for dogs, and - coming soon - candy bars. As a result of a franchise partnership, there will soon be an additional 34 locations in the Middle East.
Today there are 16 Sprinkles locations across the United States with 600 employees. “We had a line of people waiting for us to open,” Charles Nelson says. With hundreds of recipes designed and tested by Candace, they started delivering cupcakes to celebrity-filled parties and, before long, word got out that Sprinkles cupcakes were simply divine.įor the grand opening of their store, they advertised their made-from-scratch cupcakes with ingredients like Madagascar Bourbon vanilla and fresh carrots shredded in-house. The Nelsons’ innovation was Sprinkles, the first cupcake-only bakery, which they launched in Los Angeles in 2005. His motivation was simple: “Cupcakes weren’t being treated with the kind of respect we thought they should,” he says, noting that most cupcakes were baked with artificial ingredients and fillers. “Why aren’t they made with great ingredients?” he pondered as he mapped out a business plan for a cupcake bakery. But he knew cupcakes could go beyond merely delicious. So when Charles Nelson, a 1992 finance graduate, and his wife, Candace, a pastry chef, were cooking up ideas for a business after the dot-bomb era in the early 2000s, they decided to go the cupcake route. The mere mention of the topic is enough to drive people batty. Say the word and your heart fills with joy and your mouth with saliva. I was wondering if it was my own fault, but I see several other reviewers had similar reactions.Cupcakes.
But I was not entirely impressed with how they turned out.
The chocolate saved them from being an utter failure. In the middle of each cupcake I 'hid' a chocolate rosebud, and iced them with some great chocolate icing. I wonder if that was a mistake on my part and that contributed to dryness/denseness? Or they may just need a little less flour, or a little liquid (milk). I noticed one of the other reviewers used baking powder. I didn't have self rising flour (I don't think we have that in Canada), so, based on another cupcake recipe, I used 1 1/2 cups of regular flour and 1 teaspoon of baking soda. The flavour was ok, but it could have used some more sugar and vanilla I think. They weren't light and fluffy like I thought cupcakes should be. And, surprise surprise, the consistency of the cupcakes themselves was more like cookies than cupcakes. And it made a batter rather similar to that of cookies. I noticed that the ingredients in these cupcakes were very much like cookies.