Baker cooks up Valentine ‘love potions’
Whether it’s No. 9 or 99, it’ll have your sweetie floating on Cloud 9
CAMBRIDGE — Priscilla Inacio looked at her palm and made a magic sign.
“We sell ‘Love Potions,’” she said.
The 30-year-old baker at Tiny Cakes, across from city hall, wasn’t just stirring things up in the back-kitchen Dickson Street cauldron.
One day every year, on Valentine’s Day, she mixes her gypsy East Galt soul into an enchanting oversized cupcake creation sure to please already-won hearts and break long-forgotten diets.
The Love Potion, they call it.
It’s chocolate cake filled with raspberry cream, topped with chocolate ganache and some little red hearts.
She might sell 50 on the big day for four bucks apiece. Men and women, she says, seek out their potent powers of perfect-portion romantic appreciation to serve their knowing and salivating significant other.
Do they work on loved ones? Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert, laughs.
“Oh, I believe they do, yes,” said Inacio.
“We put a little special potion in there. They all make fun of me in the back. I say ‘Love Potion 99’ and everyone is like ‘No, it’s Love Potion No. 9’!”
A botched old song title? Is that what this confectionary tale comes down to? Are The Searchers and Clovers twitching beneath their rock-and-roll tombstones? No. 9 is out. Ninetynine is in.
Maybe Priscilla can’t carry an old tune like Elvis. But she can bake a tiny cake infused with an invisible elixir that stokes a burnin’ love inside.
Take a bite, you’ll start kissing everything in sight, the old lyrics says.
“Every single Valentine’s Day is busy for us,” Inacio said. “Every year, it just seems to get busier and busier.”
She’ll give a Love Potion cupcake to her road-paving husband Mike on Wednesday, like she does every Valentine’s Day. They’ve been together nine years. He’ll get her a bouquet of Gerbera daises, her favourite.
“He loves me every day just like it’s Valentine’s Day,” she says.
And their daughter Madeline? She’s three. She’ll take a brownie cheesecake cupcake over a silly Love Potion any old day.
Just don’t expect Inacio to work all night baking for Valentine’s Day.
“We save that for the tiny elves,” she said.