The Cupcakes Are Coming

Niro Feliciano has loved baking since she was a teenager. Now the Ridgefield resident is bringing her hobby to her hometown, partnering with Cafe Svago to launch a cupcakery.

Frostings, Cupcakes of Ridgefield will be based out of Svago's kitchen, where bakers under Feliciano's guidance will craft cupcakes using her original recipes to sell at the cafe on weekends, starting this Saturday.

Feliciano, a psychotherapist in Wilton who uses baking as an outlet for her work, is from Danbury and moved back to the area with her young family late last year. But before returning she and her two younger sisters collectively lived in some of country's major cities—New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles. And big cities are serious about their cupcakes.

"For the past six or seven years, maybe 10 years, we've been cupcake-obsessed," she said Friday, telling an illustrative anecdote that involved her L.A.-based sister carrying cupcakes back east on a cross-country plane trip. "There isn't that much around here in terms of cupcakes," she said.

When Feliciano and her friend in the City, Priya Patel, decided to launch Frostings, they started to design packaging, and Feliciano began making batch after batch of test cupcakes to tweak recipes to her liking. (Her ideal cupcake combines dense, moist cake with icing that doesn't have too much sugar.) She estimates having baked more than 1,000 cupcakes in the past couple of months, many of which ended up at her father's office in Danbury for feedback from his coworkers.

The efforts have paid off. Feliciano brought a test batch of red velvets into Cafe Svago on Friday. The cakes were soft and moist—though a tad unsubstantial—and had the requisite subtle cocoa aftertaste. They were topped with pristine clouds of cream cheese icing, lovingly styled and accented with marshmallow fondants. The icing was not too sweet, which made it taste creamy and bold, complementary to the cake.

Ridgefielder Frank DelliCarpini, who walked in and tried a red velvet, vigorously nodded his approval as he chewed. He said he could tell that they were baked fresh that day, a fact Feliciano confirmed.

"Anyone who doesn't like cupcakes is weird," he said.

At Svago, Frostings will sell combinations of chocolate cake, chocolate frosting, white cake and vanilla frosting as well as coconut and red velvet cupcakes. They have a broader repertoire for private orders.