Cupcakes for Sale and a New Kid on the Block

It’s a clear March Kansas City day, a little chill in the air.  Momentarily docked at Grand and Pershing in the midst of large business buildings sits a van, which is white and tall because of an extra storage-looking compartment on top.  It has a pink and purple cupcake on its port and starboard along with letters which read “3 Girls Cupcakes”.  There at the propped up right-side window is 3 Girls Cupcakes owner Simonie Wilson.  She’s handing out baked sweets from her mobile “cupcakery”. 

This temporary stop is one of six on a daily “cruise” through Kansas City’s downtown area today.   “I have 20 stops now, and it’s really just grown by demand,” Wilson says.  She gets many of the ideas about where to set up shop from the customers.  Along with strategic, scheduled stops, customers can check daily for locations and times via Facebook, Twitter, her website, e-mail, and phone calls.  “All day long.  I’m checking all of it.  People will just text me, Twitter me all day. People ask for me to just swing by.”

While cruising on some rare, unscheduled time, Wilson will park somewhere and “just see what happens.  People see me out of the tall building and come down.”  Wilson says that some good stops include the Sprint Center and Hospital Hill because those places are the only ones lunch trucks normally stop.  “People go there looking for food.  People are more prone to look there because in Kansas City, people don’t just walk out on the street expecting food.  It’s kind of new.”  3 Girls Cupcakes is the first of its kind of bakery for Kansas City.  Wilson says that a cupcake shop opening in Kansas City would generate some buzz, but this take on the cupcake business is one to differentiate herself.

“It just never occurs to me not to try.” Wilson’s philosophy, “see a need, fill a need”, helps her stand out among the 3 cupcake shops in Kansas City.  Baby Cakes, located at the City Market, was the first on the scene about seven years ago, according to Wilson.  Cupcake À La Mode came into the area after that with locations on the Plaza and in Leewood.  Smallcakes started up after that and has gotten some notoriety for their presence on Food Network’s Cupcake Wars TV show.  They now have three locations. Not only that, Wilson says there is a big mobile food truck market starting here in Kansas City.  One of them is a coffee truck that started up this year.  It also carries baked goods.  The roots of Wilson’s philosophy for 3 Girls Cupcakes mobile food business started in a few places.

“I used to be just a cupcake consumer, and in Liberty you would have to drive at least a half hour to get a cupcake.  One time, I was on a trip to Nashville.  And in Nashville there’s one like all over the place.  Like every corner.   And I thought, ‘why Kansas City couldn’t have that?’  I started thinkin about it, and there was one cupcake shop that had a curb-side pick up.  You could just pull up in your car if you’d preordered.  All of that just kept gellin in my head and after we got back from vacation, it just popped in my head: people don’t need another bakery that they have to drive to.  People need cupcakes that come to them.”

Wilson says most people try it out because a mobile cupcakery is a new idea for Kansas City, but their liking the product is what keeps them coming back and spreading the cupcake word to their friends.  However, 3 Girls is not only a mobile business.  Wilson provides sweets for events, too.

“I’ve done the Jiggle Jam, which a children’s festival right here in Crown Center, and the Farmer’s Market in Liberty is a similar sort of situation where there’s no van.  It’s just like selling cupcakes from a table.”  Other places people have been able to grab some of 3 Girls’ cupcakes include the Legends, wine tastings at the Excelsior Springs winery.  “I pretty much give everything a shot,”  Wilson says.

Wilson’s influences for baking go farther back than the inspiration for the mobile, and event cupcake bizz.  For her, food is a part of her history, and food is a passion.

“I’ve always liked sweets and I’ve always baked.  My aunt, she actually had it out of her home at the time, years and years ago out of California.  She did mostly wedding cakes.  She was like next door to me, and it was always just this…allure, you know?  Like ‘how can I get in there and eat some icing’?

I think I was around 12 when I started going over there, and she started showing me how to make royal icing flowers and how to ice a cake and just all of that basic stuff: what’s really behind baking.”

Wilson describes the environment in which her passion grew.  “It was cool ‘cause she had a really old house and she had been an artist her whole life.  So, she had all of her artwork everywhere.  She had one big room just devoted to cakes.  I just remember it being white because it was like white icing white wedding cakes, white plates, white everything.  It was all clean.  So she must’ve been doing a pretty good job because I know how hard that is!”

To the kids in her neighborhood, Wilson’s Aunt was “the cake lady.”  The 3 Girls Cupcakes van has its own sort of gravity, and a person who get there hands on a cupcake becomes “like a little kid” (saying, “‘Ooooo!  I get to eat this’”), others are sort of perplexed by the idea of cupcake mobility cruising Kansas City Streets while they walk by.

  “There’s a few faces [people make], but there’s one like ‘what is that?’, you know?  ‘You have cupcakes now?’  But then there’s the cupcake face, which is people walkin by, and they may not even be talkin to me or anything, but I see it.  And they’re like ‘Ooooo!’, you know?  There’s just a face!”

With no one else around the van and Wilson checking the Internet-connected phone in her hand, it’s time for her to cruise on to the next cupcake stop on the schedule.  She lowers the propped up window back to the van’s side, starts the engine, and sets out to Eighth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, the final stop for the day.