Restaurant

Cupcakes are serious business here, not your usual PTA-bake-sale, icing-from-a-can numbers. Each offering is a little work of culinary art, beginning with a basic vanilla butter cake or chocolate cake base slathered with buttercream and toppings.

Ordering is half the fun: there's a "Dance Party with Holly Hobby" (white cake, pink frosting, rainbow sprinkles), and a "Chocolate Bunny" (chocolate cake, white frosting, coconut). While it's hard to rationalize any sort of health benefit from eating cupcakes, you can take comfort that the dairy products used are hormone-free, that there are no stabilizers in the frosting, and the chocolate comes from Guittard.

You can take your cupcakes home in a pink bakery box, or devour them on site as you ponder art on the walls and sip Umbria coffee. Owner Jody Hall says that the coffeehouse atmosphere is just as important as the cupcakes. "I wanted to provide something nobody else is doing, but something that's easily understandable," she says.

Tip: Order forms make it easy to cater your gathering. Ideally, you should allow 48 hours in advance for a dozen or more, and when you buy 11 you get one free.