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If you don’t believe fairy tales do come true then you haven’t met Angelica Terrazas, creator and owner of Scrumdidily Dollops, the cupcake-ice cream-cookie-candy shop that opened March 7 on North 10th Street. Above, Terrazas puts sprinkles on one of her cupcakes. |
Cupcakes: Scrumdidily Dollops shows fairy tales do come true
April 20, 2012
By Peggy Kelly
Santa Paula News
If you don’t believe fairy tales do come true then you haven’t met Angelica Terrazas, creator and owner of Scrumdidily Dollops, the cupcake-ice cream-cookie-candy shop that opened March 7 on North 10th Street. Once you step inside you’ll see it’s more than a shop, the result of a lifelong dream Angelica, now 19, worked for since she was a child.
“I always made cakes for my three sisters’ birthdays” as well as cookies Angelica said soon became favorites of her friends. It didn’t take long for an idea to form: as an Isbell Middle School 8th grader Angelica “wrote a book about my store... Scrumdidily Dollops.”
She is Dollop (Scrumdidily is the fairy clan’s last name), and two of her sisters are also named to reflect the theme and feel of the shop as well as their on-duty personas. Maria Elena is Sprinkle, while 10-year-old Analiese is Truffle, “our taster.”
A colorful and whimsical mural takes up one side of the approximately 900-square foot shop showing “fairy bakers, the story of how we bake our cupcakes” featuring Dollop, Sprinkle and Truffle.
Of course Maria Elena’s character is the inventor: “She’s in the MESA, Mathmatical/Enginering/Science Achievement program” at school, said Angelica. “She’s only 12 years old, but you have to start them young!”
Taking pencil in hand Angelica outlined the mural: “It was so complicated” she had trouble impressing upon potential artists what she wanted, but muralist Jeanine Hattas of Los Angeles-based Fresh Murals got it just right. Angelica’s friend Jennifer Lara also helped create the mural.
Angelica started working young to earn the money for the shop: “I had two part-time jobs, never bought a car, didn’t go to dances or did anything that would cost money... I ditched school to go to work. “For me,” she said looking around the shop, “this is college... this is my dream” that she started all with cash. “And if I lose it, I lose it.”
With birthday parties and cupcake decorating classes already popular, losing the business is a remote possibility.
Angelica is careful with her product, whether it be cupcake frostings or the McConnell’s Ice Cream - “The best!” - that she sells. The cupcake frosting has no preservatives and only the finest ingredients, real unsalted European butter for the butter cream that towers atop the petite cakes.
Scrumdidily Dollops sells out of cupcakes every day and Angelica also has orders to fill, “lots of requests” for cakes and other goodies for celebrations. She particularly likes decorating cakes, fondant and marzipan perfect for sculpting, “like clay... and I use food coloring like paint. It’s edible art!”
Word has spread fast and Scrumdidily Dollops has become a treat stop for many people who enjoy the variety offered - from Red Velvet, “very, very good,” said Angelica, and cinnamon to “our cookie dough, also very good.”
Adults and children alike fill the weekly decorating classes, each centered on a theme. For Easter there were cupcakes frosted to resemble lambs and Hello Kitty faces just for fun.
“There are so many things you can do” with frosting, and Angelica listens to her customers including one child who said they should tackle making the cupcake “look like a cheeseburger... and we might do that! The decorating classes are like Disneyland, you get people 10 to 110!”
Maria Elena helps out at the shop in between her duties as the Isbell Associated Student Body vice president, a member of the Cancer Crushers and, said Angelica, “an awesome promoter.”
Maria Elena (“In here Sprinkle is better,” noted Angelica) said her older sister “always had a lot of different ideas.... This was one of the good ones,” but she sees her future to be one of attending an Ivy League university and exploring the world.
Angelica learned that even fairies need help, and she credits friends Tony Estrada, Mercedes Acosta and Lara with being particularly supportive, as well as Matt Roth of Ventura County Environmental Health. And of course there are others: “Do I believe in fairies? Of course,” said Angelica. I believe in fairy tales and serendipitous encounters.”
The Santa Paula community, she added, “has been so wonderful to us... generous and helpful. It’s an incredible feeling, awesome to think I was born and raised here. My friends have gone tremendously out of their way to help.” And that includes transportation, as, noted Angelica, “I still don’t have a car!”
