Strawberry Cupcake Festival starts July 1st!

Strawberry Festival 4 Pack

The 4^th of July is just around the corner which means that summer can officially begin in Seattle. To celebrate, we're having a Strawberry Festival during the month of July! Our neighbors to the north, Skagit Sun, have supplied us with locally-sourced, organic strawberries that we incorporated into each of this month's four cupcake flavors. Our bakers have been busily consulting with grandmothers and country fair winners alike to come up with the most delicious flavor combinations and we think you'll love them as much as we do!

Strawberry 66

Strawberry 66 is our classic vanilla buttercake topped with Strawberry buttercream. The ingredients for this delicious cupcake are over 66% local, which we think makes it the most local cupcake around. Frank Bruni would be proud.

Chocolate Dipped Strawberry

Chocolate Dipped Strawberry starts with our moist chocolate cake, then we add our strawberry buttercream and dip it into fine chocolate vermicelli.

Strawberry Shortcake

Strawberry Shortcake has a sweet strawberry puree baked into a vanilla cake with a whipped cream strawberry frosting and topped with graham cracker crumbs.

Strawberry Velvet

Strawberry Velvet updates our classic red velvet cake with a whipped cream strawberry frosting.

Nothing says summer like strawberries so pick some up for your next picnic or party! We make it easy to try them all with our Strawberry Festival 4-pak! $3.50 each or the 4-pak for $13.50.

Call 206-883-7656 or visit www.cupcakeroyale.com to pre-order your Strawberry Festival four pack for pick-up tomorrow! Happy summer, y'all!

It Gets Better...

The Gay cupcake

When selecting a charity to support with their The Gay cupcake, choosing the It Gets Better Project was a no-brainer for Cupcake Royale owner Jody Hall. Founded by Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller, the It Gets Better Project seeks to give hope to LGBT youth by letting them know that life gets better. Their video went viral and soon everyday folks (and celebrities and politicians, too) were making videos of support.

Cupcake Royale donated 50% of all proceeds from sales of The Gay (and Baby Gay). They set a lofty goal to raise $5,000 during June but after a week or so, it became clear that they were going to quickly reach that goal and they upped the ante to $10,000! Dan Savage said, “Cupcake Royale's support for the It Gets Better Project is personally gratifying—I'm a regular customer, an addict, and a fan—and it will make a huge difference to LGBT youth throughout the country. We can't thank Jody and her team enough for their generosity."

Sold only during the month of June, The Gay Cupcake featured Cupcake Royale’s classic vanilla buttercake and vanilla buttercream, along with a healthy infusion of rainbow confetti in the cake, rainbow sprinkles and a proud rainbow sugar topper.

Jody Hall adds, “It’s amazing that we were able to do this, and use our “super powers” for good! By selling this cupcake and asking the community to join us in our efforts, we are able to make a great impact to IGBP. I’m so proud to be able to galvanize our community and customers around making a difference, and send a huge “thanks” out to our customers for jumping in!”

A very sweet deal for our Bellevue friends!

We're sure excited to add Bellevue to our family of neighborhood cafés. In addition to our delicious scratch-baked cupcakes made with local nad sustainable ingredients, we are the first in Bellevue to brew the legendary Stumptown Coffee.

As a token of our new friendship, we'd like to offer you a sweet deal! Be among the first to try the new Cupcake Royale in Bellevue! Bring this special coupon into our Bellevue café, and when you buy 3 cupcakes, we'll give you 3 cupcakes for free! But wait! There's more! For every three you purchase with this coupon, we'll donate three to the Bellevue High School PTSA...and they're planning a big bake sale any day now to raise money for the school. 

It's what we like to call a RANDOM ACT OF CUPCAKES. And we encourage you to spread the love, too! Witness somebody doing some good? Hand them a surprise box of cupcakes and leave them smiling and dazed with pleasant curiosity about the goodness of life. 

Go forth and be random, we say. Share your Random Acts of Cupcakes stories, and read others HERE. 

We're Hiring!

We have a really fun job that just opened up! It's an important role as the Cupcake Phone Ambassador (otherwise known as the Inside Sales Customer Service Rep). We're open to full or part time applicants. Please check out the job description and contact Krista@cupcakeroyale.com if you are interested.

Must be able to juggle lots of priorities, organize a complex workload, and most of all...provide top notch customer service.

Key areas of responsibility:
Customer Service Rep: Man the phones from 8am – 5pm (with an hour lunch and breaks as needed!) to create happy Cupcake Royale customers. Primary responsibilities are to take customer orders and answer questions. Act as key point person on processing orders, coordinating special requests internally, and communicating/following up with the team on all key activities.

Donations: Share the cupcake love! Manage donations following the current procedures. Ensure orders are placed, coordinate pickup or delivery, provide signage, brochures and collateral, and manage internal communication. Forward special requests and sponsorship opportunities to marketing and follow up to get back to each party.

Art: Create community. Mange the art calendar for all stores to ensure we have a pipeline of art that meets our company standards. Coordinate postings in local art walk guides. Coordinate hanging and removal of art with both the stores and the artists. Communicate the schedule with marketing to collaborate on promotion (i.e. Facebook, website, etc.).

Weddings: Go above and beyond to make Cupcake Royale the obvious choice for people planning weddings. Act as key point of contact for customers looking for information about booking a cupcake wedding. Provide order and logistics information, assist with customization options, coordinate orders.

Office manager: Bring harmony to the Capitol Hill office/backroom. Be in charge of office supplies and inventory. Be sure the back room is organized, everything has its place, and all inner office materials are distributed as needed.

Misc: Help out with special projects as needed!

Oh, hello, Bellevue.

Oh, hello, Bellevue. Nice to meet you! We've seen you sitting over there for awhile now, and we thought maybe it was about time we came over. We want in on all the Bellevue fun, and as a token of our friendship, we’re bringing cupcakes! Seattle’s Best Cupcakes, actually. See, we’ve been over here in Seattle for seven years now, baking our cupcakes fresh from scratch each and every day using mostly local, organic, and sustainable ingredients. We make ‘em with love, the way Grandma did, and we hand-frost each and every one with real American buttercream. It’s been a super sweet seven years, and we are proud to call Capitol Hill, Ballard, Madrona, and West Seattle home. And now, we’re just plain tickled pink to add Bellevue to our family of neighborhood cupcake goodness. And we think you might just get a little bit excited too…

Bygone days are here again...now with buttercream!

Our fifth cupcake café is gonna be an extravaganza of cupcake and coffee Americana goodness! The newest addition to the Cupcake Royale family will make its home in one of America's original IHOP buildings, complete with all the architectural charm and whimsy of those bygone days. Remember the A-frames and the wood paneling? As Jody likes to say, this is "what our café would have looked like had we opened in 1971." We're lucky enough to work once again with Roy McMakin on a quick and easy, guerilla-style makeover, to create a hip and homey neighborhood cupcake café that we think you’ll really love.

This café is going to be special for sure. A little bit different from our Seattle locations, this one will celebrate the history of the building and the quirkiness of the original design with a sweet and sassy combo of found decor, relics from the original IHOP, and custom pieces created especially for Cupcake Royale, like the 30-person, Doug Fir picnic table where you and all your friends can hang out on our patio. For those of you who frequented the original IHOPs of yore, you may remember those cool open kitchens. Well, we’re keeping that, too! The café will feature a wide-open kitchen where wide-eyed cupcakers of all ages can marvel at the magic of our behind-the-scenes operations.

The perfect partner for all this cupcake love? STUMPTOWN! We'll be the first café in Bellevue to be brewing those legendary Stumptown beans. That's right, people! We're bringing the very best, small-batch, freshly roasted beans in the whole wide world to Bellevue. And for those lazy days at home, we'll feature a fine little assortment of whole beans and home-brewing equipment.

Hold on! There’s more! The new café will open its doors at the end of this month, and we know it sure wouldn’t be very Royale of us to get our brand new friends-and-neighbors-to-be all excited about the impending cupcake funtimes…and then leave them waiting. So…the piece de résistance...THE MOBILE CUPCAKE PARTY-CART! Starting this very morning, we are debuting the first-ever mobile cupcake cart. It's like a hot dog cart, only way more awesome, and filled with cupcakes. We'll be parkin' our cart in the parking lot and serving up fresh-baked goodness to our new friends and neighbors until the doors to the café are officially open. We sure would love it if you stopped by and said hello. Anyone who gets a cupcake from the cart will also get a thank you card good for a free coffee when the doors to the café finally do open. Once the café is open for business, the Cupcake Party-Cart will head out into the world, available for birthdays, company parties, weddings, anniversaries, you name it!

Takin' sweet to the street.

So, to sum it all up, short and sweet:

WHAT: A new Cupcake Royale in Bellevue!

WHERE: 21 Bellevue Way NE, in that sweet old IHOP building!

WHEN: End of the month, but until then, get your cupcake on with us at our MOBILE CUPCAKE PARTY-CART in the parking lot!

WHY: Because we love you.

Cupcake Royale Is Expanding And We Need YOU!

Big news! We’re excited to let our friends, here on our blog, be the first to know that we are opening a new store. Can you guess where? Here’s some clues…

• The city has a total area of 33.9 square miles, of which, 30.8 square miles of it is land and 3.2 square miles of it (9.29%) is water
• Founded in 1869, the name is French for "beautiful view"
• Named number 1 in CNN Money's list of the best places to live and launch a business
• Also named the 4th best place to live in America
• This city is in the top 7% in the state for well-paid-single men and top 4% for well-paid-single women
• It’s one of the 25 safest cities in America
• Both Ann and Nancy Wilson, co-founders of the band Heart, are said to reside here

Write your answer down on a piece of paper (so you won’t cheat) and then scroll down to see if you are right…

The answer is BELLEVUE! If you are so super smart that you figured that out, you must be passionate about the Bellevue community – and that’s the type of folks we are looking to hire! So, if you also love the art of great coffee and delicious cupcakes, we’d like to hear from you for the positions of: Cupcake Bakers, Baristas, Frosters.

We are looking for baristas who have a passion for hand crafted artisan coffee. And bakers and frosters who enjoy baking cake from scratch with local ingredients in large batches with high quality and productivity standards. Our values center around having fun, working hard as a team, creating an engaging customer service experience, being kind to our environment, giving back to community efforts and a passion for your work and sharing your enthusiasm with customers.

• Baristas should be experienced with 1+ years of artisan coffee crafting and engaging customer service and an appreciation for scratch-baked goods.

• Bakers should be experienced with 1+ years in high-volume production baking with attention to detail and ability to work collaboratively in teams, attention to detail, pride in work, reliable.

• Frosters should be able to learn and work quickly, be able to prioritize, have a high level of customer service and be flexible and prompt.

Qualified folks should apply by sending a resume and cover letter to cupcakes1111@gmail.com explaining why you’d be a good fit. Thanks for your interest!

By the way, not only do you get to surround yourself with coffee and cupcakes, but here’s a few additional tidbits to sweeten the deal:

• We offer benefits to our super stellar crew: medical insurance for 30+ hours/week, 401K, all you can drink espresso, great deals on cupcakes and merchandise…plus cool co-workers!
• We use all natural, wholesome ingredients in our tasty, fresh-baked cupcakes, and we get them from local farmers whenever we can. Even our flour is local – grown on a no-till co-op by our pal Farmer Fred in Eastern Washington, and specially milled just for us.
• We only brew the best beans: Stumptown! They travel worldwide to source and roast the best coffees available anywhere. Developing partnerships with farms to share in a belief that working together year after year results in the highest level of quality.
• We are a green, locally owned, indie business. We not only recycle, but we compost as well, and we use compostable packaging as much as possible, too, from paper cups to soy ink to corn-based plastic.
• We give over 25,000 cupcakes a year to local non-profits to give back to our community.

Cupcake-Powered Radio

You know we love the KEXP. What's not to love? Great bands. Great DJs. And it's all made possible by you, the oh-so-savvy listener. Well, you and all the sweet Seattle businesses that support KEXP by underwriting. If ever there was a win-win situation, underwriting for KEXP would have to be the win-winniest. We hear our favorite fellow local businesses mentioned on KEXP all the time, and it just makes us feel good. All of us community-minded music lovers pooling our resources to keep the tunes a comin'. 

Recently, our buddy Rob over at KEXP asked Jody to record a testimonial about why she underwrites for KEXP...and has since day one! That's 7 years of cupcake-powered radio, people. Super. Sweet. 

Rock on, KEXP. Here's to 7 more years of cupcake love headed your way.