Cities Cupcake represents towns with pastries

If Knoxville is a cupcake, what flavor is it?

According to Linda Hurst, executive pastry chef of Cities Cupcake Boutique, it is a light orange chiffon topped with melt-in-your-mouth vanilla butter cream frosting and sparkly orange sugar. “The Knoxville” is just one of 17 city-themed cupcakes available at Hurst’s cupcake boutique on Kingston Pike.

Hurst created the boutique’s top 10 city flavors, beginning with Knoxville. “The first job would be coming up with a particular city’s cupcake,” she says. “Like Knoxville was so easy. Then with the D.C., [I thought] you know very conservative, vanilla, the whole look and feel of it.”

In 2005, Hurst moved to Knoxville from Washington, D.C. when her husband accepted a job with E.W. Scripps Co. She realized Knoxville didn’t have specialty cupcake shops like the ones popping up in Washington and thought it was the perfect place for one. “[I thought Knoxville] was kind of this small town with a sophisticated crowd that would be interested in a product like that,” she says.

But Hurst, a former marketing professional, wanted her cupcake boutique to have a cohesive theme. “A lot of the cupcake shops do not have a unifying theme,” she explains. “They’ll say, ‘This is our rocky road cupcake, or this is our chocolate cupcake,’ which to me, doesn’t have as much marketing panache.”

So she racked her marketing brain, and one night at 4 a.m., she came up with the idea of creating cupcakes to represent individual cities.

Hurst encourages her staff to contribute to the naming and creation of additional city cupcakes. “Our latest cupcake, which is really really good is called Sioux City Squash Cupcake,” she grins, “and it takes a yellow squash, and it tastes like the best sugar cookie ever. And it came from one of my baking team member’s friends.”

Hurst says that McKenzie Roddy, one of her baking team members, came up with the Savannah cupcake, a yellow base cake with chocolate frosting and a smores combination topping.

Roddy’s younger sister was a girl scout for a very long time, so she linked Savannah to the girl scouts and the Smores flavor, because Savannah is the home of the girl scouts.

Hurst’s boutique sells 15 sweet cupcakes every day and two salty cupcakes on “Salty Thursdays.” The Sante Fe cupcake is actually jalapeno cornbread with ranch-spiced cream cheese and butter icing garnished with bacon bits. “We pipe [the icing] on to look sweet,” she giggles mischievously. “The whole idea is to blow peoples’ minds. A salty cupcake? What is that? What does it look like?”

Hurst says the Chicago cupcake is the boutique’s current bestseller, but her favorite cupcake isn’t offered yet. “I think I just came out with a new favorite that’s not on [the menu] here,” she laughs. “We actually now have another five flavors that aren’t on that menu yet.”

Customer Kelle Jolly says the boutique’s city theme intrigued her. “Knowing the cupcakes were named after cities made me curious to see what aspects of each city make up each recipe,” she says.

Although customers come to the boutique for its cupcakes, Clark Davidson, a communications student at UT, says the staff is the shop’s best feature. “My favorite thing about Cities Cupcake Boutique is the extreme friendliness of their employees,” he says. “The ladies there are informative about their mission at Cities Cupcake and make choosing a cupcake a personable experience.” Jolle says it is this friendliness that makes people want them to succeed.

Hurst and her staff like to see other locals succeed as well. She wanted her boutique to be very regional, so she sells local people’s products and displays local artists’ work.

Jan Crowder, the boutique’s art director, once worked in an art gallery. Now she recruits local talent to display in the shop. “I will go around to different art studios where I know people, especially beginning artists, because they really haven’t had a chance to get established, and they need a place to show their work,” Crowder says. She also promotes the shop’s art program on the web using venues like Craig’s list.

Davidson thinks the program is genius because it allows local artists to be recognized and possibly discovered to become national icons, and Jolle thinks it creates a sense of community.

For Hurst, that sense of community solidifies her boutique’s theme. “We’re kind of like a local flavor, and our cupcakes are local flavors,” she says with a smile.