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This Issue 09/18/2008

Also in this issue

• Best Week Ever: Jeans
• Recipes of the Week
• Letter from the Editor
• Dying Stars

Given the relatively low risk and ready market of hungry students, delivering food on campus has proven to be a recipe for success. Penn entrepreneurs Richard Talens and Terence Huang founded Cupmakes, an online design-your-own-cupcake venture, earlier this year, and quickly went from baking out of the Kappa Alpha fraternity house (where Huang was a brother) to establishing a permanent operation out of the College Pizza/Chestnut Diner facility at 42nd and Chestnut Streets. The founders had admired the success of Insomnia Cookies, which stood as evidence that Penn has a huge customer base for late night desserts, but they aimed to diverge from their predecessor's model. For Cupmakes, customization was key.

They recently secured enough capital to hire a general manager, Christopher Rice, whose extensive restaurant experience includes training bartenders at eight McCormick and Schmick's locations. Talens, who is taking an extra semester at Wharton before graduating with a concentration in OPIM, says he brought Rice on board to help streamline both the bakery and delivery processes - to do "a little bit of everything," in Rice's words. Cupmakes aficionados will notice even more refinements this semester, including new icings and flavors like cinnamon cream cheese and tres leches, as well as weekly rotational holiday specials and eventually even vegan and gluten-free recipes. "My personal favorite Cupmake is vanilla base, vanilla icing and rainbow sprinkles," Huang says. "It's not the manliest cupcake, but our bakers make mean vanilla icing."

Such variety reflects the great strides Cupmakes has made since its founding. But the sweet taste of success doesn't come easily. An average workday during their first semester of operation consisted of arriving at College Pizza at 6 p.m. after a long day of class to prepare and bake the Cupmakes before opening at 10, Huang says. They would operate until 2:30 a.m., but "so many people [would] call us and beg us to make a last order for them even though it was 15 minutes after closing." They would then clean the tables, mop the floor and wash all the pans and dishes before finally walking back to their dorm at 3 a.m.