To the Cupcake Queen Who Beat Me to It: A Love Letter to Sprinkles Cupcakes (and Candace Nelson)

I found out on Instagram.

Candace Nelson, saying the words I never thought I'd hear: "Today is Sprinkles' final day."

I actually gasped. Out loud. In my house. Alone.

And then I did what any rational person would do when their long-time cupcake obsession announces its death: I sent my husband to The Grove on New Year's Eve to get the flavors I never tried.

Here's what you need to understand about The Grove on a regular Tuesday: it's already a circle of hell designed by someone who loves both Christmas lights and human suffering. On New Year's Eve? With Sprinkles closing forever? It was the Hunger Games, but everyone's fighting over red velvet.

My husband, bless him, thought the pre-order would save him. He walked past dozens of people in a line that wrapped around the building like some kind of buttercream pilgrimage. He was so confident.

That's when she appeared.

An employee he later described as "straight out of Coyote Ugly" emerged from the shop and made an announcement: "We don't have many left."

Someone in the crowd: "What if you pre-ordered?"

Her: "Get in a new line."

Chaos. Absolute chaos. People at the back started shouting, demanding to know how many cupcakes were left.

"A couple," she said.

Someone asked about gluten-free. Another person muttered, "Gen Z."

My husband stood frozen in the madness, no longer sure which line to be in or what was even happening. When his turn finally came, he just took whatever they handed him and fled. The Grove was dropping fake snow, which would have been magical if he hadn't spotted a cop car driving past. "I wondered if it was for Sprinkles," he told me later, still processing the trauma.

He made it home. I have no idea what flavors these cupcakes are, and honestly? It doesn't matter.

Because this was never just about cupcakes.

The Cupcake Shop I Never Opened (And Why I'm Still Not Over It)

2006. I had THE idea.

Cupcakes on Tap. A cupcake shop where you could get alcohol-infused cupcakes, where girlfriends could go at night to decorate, laugh, and feel safe while getting a little tipsy on bourbon vanilla buttercream. I designed the whole thing in my head. The sign: cupcakes flowing out of a bar tap, like the world's best fountain.

I called the Franklin Village location.

I called again.

And again.

They never called me back.

You know that specific kind of heartbreak when a landlord ghosts you? When your whole dream is sitting there, fully formed in your brain, and the only thing standing between you and opening day is someone picking up the phone?

Yeah. That.

So I pivoted. (Which is just a fancy word for "cried, then got angry, then built something else.")

I took my cupcake shop idea online and launched BakeSpace.com. The first food-themed social network. We built this whole community of home bakers and cooks. I couldn't let go of the dream entirely, but I channeled it into something new.

I was proud. I am proud. BakeSpace became something real.

But I'm not going to lie to you and pretend I never wondered what would have happened if Franklin Village had just picked up the phone.

Meanwhile, in Beverly Hills...

While I was nursing my rejected cupcake shop dream, Candace Nelson was building Sprinkles, the world's first cupcake-only bakery.

And she was doing EVERYTHING. The font. Oh my god, that font. Those perfect little dots. The flavors that made cupcakes feel like an event, not just a dessert. The whole aesthetic that said, "Yes, we're just cupcakes, and yes, we're going to make you feel fancy about it."

I watched her empire grow while I built mine in a completely different direction.

Here's the thing about envy: it's not always ugly. Sometimes it's just... complicated. I wasn't bitter. I was in awe. She did what I'd imagined doing, except she did it BETTER. She made it iconic.

I'd see Sprinkles popping up in more cities. I'd see the lines. The cupcake ATM (GENIUS, by the way). The appearances on Cupcake Wars.

And every time, there was this tiny voice in my head that said, "That could have been you."

But here's the thing I've learned after almost 20 years of building BakeSpace: we don't all get the same story. And that's okay. Maybe even good.

Because if Franklin Village HAD called me back, I wouldn't have built BakeSpace. I wouldn't have created this community of thousands of home cooks. I wouldn't be where I am now with BakeBot.

But still. I wondered.

The Day I Almost Met the Cupcake Queen

Years later, I auditioned to be a judge on Cupcake Wars.

With Candace.

I went through the whole process. Prepared. Showed up. Did my thing. And then... nothing.

I never got the gig. Which means I never got to meet her.

So close. So painfully close. I was THIS close to sitting across from the woman whose success I'd been quietly studying, admiring, and maybe slightly envying while building my own thing in a completely different direction.

THIS close to talking cupcakes with the Cupcake Queen herself.

And it didn't happen.

That's the thing about these stories, right? They don't always have the perfect full-circle moment you want. Sometimes you audition for the thing and you don't get it. Sometimes the person you've been watching from afar stays... afar.

But I like to think she would have been lovely. Of course she would have been.

Why I Needed Those Last Cupcakes

So when I saw Candace's Instagram post saying Sprinkles was closing, I felt it.

Not just "oh that's sad." I mean I FELT it. This weird grief for a business I never worked at, for a dream that was never mine but felt adjacent to mine, for an era of cupcakes and possibility and scrappy beginnings.

She sold Sprinkles to private equity in 2012. She hasn't been involved operationally in over a decade. But when she posted that video, you could hear her heart breaking.

"This isn't how I thought the story would go," she said. "I thought Sprinkles would keep growing and be around forever."

God, I felt that in my bones.

When you build something from scratch, even after you sell it, even after you step away, it's still YOURS in some fundamental way. You still care what happens to it. You still grieve when it ends.

That's why I sent my husband to The Grove on New Year's Eve to fight through the chaos and get those cupcakes. Not because I desperately needed red velvet. But because I needed to mark the moment.

The cupcake shop that could have been my competitor but ended up being my inspiration was closing its doors. And I needed to say goodbye.

What Candace Taught Me (Without Ever Knowing She Was Teaching Me)

I've been watching Candace's journey for almost 20 years now. Reading her interviews, following her moves, learning from her choices. She's been open about the messy parts, the hard parts, the parts that don't make it into the success story headlines.

Here's what I've learned from watching the Cupcake Queen build, scale, sell, and reflect:

Anyone can start. Not everyone will.

Candace says this all the time: entrepreneurship isn't for special people with special gifts. She built Sprinkles out of something literally anyone can do. Baking cupcakes. In a kitchen. With a KitchenAid mixer.

The difference? She actually DID it. She couldn't stop thinking about it, so she made it real.

Most of us have ideas. The difference between an idea and a business is execution. And stubbornness. Mostly stubbornness.

Test the dream before you marry it.

Before Sprinkles, Candace went to pastry school. Not just to learn technique, but to see if she actually wanted to wake up at dawn every day, wear chef's whites, haul flour, and live that life.

She treated her passion like a relationship you date before committing. Smart.

Because not every passion should become a business. Sometimes you want to protect the thing you love and keep it as your escape. But if you're going to build your livelihood around it, make sure you actually like the reality of it, not just the fantasy.

Success means losing the thing that got you there.

This one hurts.

Candace has been honest about it: the bigger Sprinkles got, the further she got from actually baking cupcakes. Scaling meant stepping away from the thing she loved most. That loss is real. She's grieved it publicly.

I relate to this so much with BakeSpace. The more we grew, the less I was in the community doing the thing I loved (connecting with home cooks one-on-one). I was managing, strategizing, solving problems. That's what growth costs sometimes.

It doesn't mean don't grow. It just means go in with your eyes open about what you'll gain and what you'll lose.

Your purpose has to be bigger than your product.

Even when Candace stepped away from the baking itself, her purpose stayed constant: "elevating simple pleasures and injecting surprise and delight into a person's day."

That's not about cupcakes. That's about joy. That's about making someone's ordinary day a little bit special.

THAT'S the thing that can sustain you when the day-to-day work changes. When you're not doing the thing you thought you'd always be doing.

Your "why" needs to be bigger than the specific thing you're making. Because the thing will evolve. It has to.

You don't have to be just one thing. In fact, please don't be.

Candace struggled with this for years. Was she a business person? A pastry chef? A mom? A writer? A judge on TV? She felt like she had to choose one identity and commit.

Her breakthrough came when she realized: all of it. She's all of those things. And the multifaceted-ness isn't a bug, it's her superpower.

I feel this deeply. I'm a TV producer. A founder. Someone who still replies to every BakeSpace email personally. Someone who's now building AI tools for home cooks. I don't fit in one box. And I'm done apologizing for it.

The world will try to make you pick a lane. You don't have to. Your complexity is your strength.

The Cupcakes We'll Never Taste Again

I still don't know which flavors my husband brought home from that chaotic last day at The Grove.

I almost don't want to know. Because maybe Sprinkles was never really about the specific cupcake you ordered. Maybe it was about what it represented.

A scrappy beginning. (Candace started with a KitchenAid mixer and chutzpah.)

A ridiculous idea that became iconic. (Just cupcakes! JUST CUPCAKES!)

A woman who bet on buttercream and won.

The stores are closed now. Private equity made decisions that Candace had no control over. The ending wasn't the one any of us imagined.

But here's what I keep coming back to: we all showed up.

For 20 years, people showed up for those cupcakes. For birthdays and breakups, for celebrations and random Tuesdays when you just needed something sweet. Sprinkles became part of our traditions, our memories, our stories. It mattered to people.

That's a legacy no business decision can erase.

Dear Candace,

Thank you.

Thank you for showing me (and everyone else watching) that a KitchenAid mixer and a big idea can change everything.

Thank you for making cupcakes MATTER. For making them feel special. For creating something that brought genuine joy to millions of people.

Thank you for being honest about the hard parts. About what it costs to build something. About what it feels like to watch it end in a way you didn't choose.

Thank you for being scrappy and determined and willing to wake up at dawn to pipe buttercream when most people were still sleeping.

You built something beautiful. It brought people together. It created memories. That's more than most businesses ever do.

To Sprinkles, With Love

You were never just a cupcake shop.

You were proof that joy can be piped into perfect swirls and sold for $4.25.

You were proof that good branding and great flavors can create something iconic.

You were proof that sometimes the simplest ideas, executed with care and passion, become the most memorable.

Rest in buttercream, Sprinkles. You'll be missed.

And to My Dream That Never Was

Cupcakes on Tap, you live on in my what-if daydreams. In the fact that I will forever be emotionally attached to businesses built on frosting. In the possibility that maybe, just maybe, one day I'll actually open that shop.

Franklin Village might not have called me back in 2006, but who says the story has to end there?

Maybe I got to build something better first. BakeSpace. BakeBot. A whole journey I never would have taken if that landlord had picked up the phone.

Or maybe I'm just really good at making lemonade out of lemons. (Or in this case, online communities out of rejected cupcake shop dreams.)

Either way, I'm grateful. For Sprinkles. For Candace. For the journey that brought me here. And for the dream that's still waiting.

My husband made it out of The Grove alive.

The cupcakes, whatever flavors they were, were perfect.

And somehow, that feels like exactly the right ending.

🧁

P.S. If anyone from private equity is reading this: you closed an icon. I hope you know that. And I hope you feel a tiny bit bad about it.