The Cupcake Sisters and their polka-dotted truck

One cool morning last week, a pink polka-dotted minivan pulled into a vast expanse of asphalt. A tall, grassy mountain made of trash loomed in the distance.

Suddenly, a woman inside the truck slid open the window on the side. She had brown hair and wore a green sweater, and her name was Tracy Busching. The words Twisted Sisters were painted in pink letters on her van. They were sinister-sounding words, but Tracy smiled sweetly as she put a magnetic sign on the van’s side and stuck pictures of cupcakes on it.

All the cupcakes had mysterious names.

The Salty Dog was made of chocolate cake, topped with a salt-sprinkled cloud of caramel-infused butter cream icing, the kind from Switzerland that is not so sweet.

The Southern Belle cupcake was velvet red inside, like a Christmas dress. It had a puff of ermine icing on top, which Tracy had cooked in her very own Virginia Beach kitchen, where serious-looking people called health inspectors had visited to make sure it was clean enough to cook in.

Tracy had baked more than 1,000 cupcakes in a single week so that she and her sister, Cassandra Ayala, could fill up their brand new truck with 300 cupcakes and drive around Virginia Beach and serve up the sweet little $3 treats to people stuck in office buildings.

Cassandra knows what it is like to be stuck on the job all day. Not so long ago, she was a real estate broker who stopped working only to sleep. She was lucky enough to have a sister who loves to make cupcakes, and the two thought it would be good to start a cupcake business on wheels.

When the sisters were little and lived way up in Norway, Maine, their Grammy McAllister had baked pies and cookies and doughnuts for a food truck that sold lunches to workers at lumber mills and paper factories.

Some big cities like Baltimore and New York already have lots of food trucks that sell yummy things, but because there were none in Virginia Beach where Cassandra and Tracy lived, they thought it would be fun to start one. Someday they hope they can get permission to drive around other cities, too.

But on that cool fall morning, something was wrong.

Even though the spot where the pink polka-dotted truck parked was nearly surrounded by office buildings, the people inside didn’t seem to notice. Nearby, on Virginia Beach Boulevard, people in cars stared as they zoomed by.

But no one stopped.

Then a brown car appeared in the parking lot and a man got out! He walked up to the window and, just like that, handed Cassandra $27. She handed him a brown box filled with cupcakes.  The man’s name was Jerrel Cannon, and he said that he loved cupcakes so much he has driven his car all the way to Richmond to get them from a bakery named Pearl’s.

He was going to share the sisters’ cupcakes with the people he worked with at Didlake Inc. in the shadow of the mountain made of trash. If he liked them, he promised he’d come back to the same place at the same time next week to buy more.

After the man left, no one else came.

So the sisters drove their pink truck across the busy street and parked near the trash mountain. Mommies with babies in strollers walked by, and so did a gaggle of giggling girls. One said, “Wow! It’s like an ice cream truck with cupcakes!” but they didn’t slow down one single bit.

Finally, when the sisters were starting to get sad, a girl came out of the office building across the street and walked briskly toward the pink truck. She told the sisters that the workers inside had spied it from their desks. Her name was Amanda Houff, and she was sent to buy cupcakes for all of them. When Amanda learned that the sisters would come back every week if the workers wanted, she made plans to start an office cupcake fund.

The sisters were happy, and got even happier a few minutes later when they parked in front of a tall brick building named Centura College. All of a sudden, like magic, a squiggly line of ladies appeared beside the truck. Each one listened closely as the sisters described the flavors, and almost every one left with a little brown bag with a cupcake in it.

For the rest of the day, no matter where the sisters went, people lined up for cupcakes.

The sisters didn’t have a bell like the ice cream man, so they used bells of a different sort called Facebook and Twitter to let people know every few minutes where the truck was headed and when it would stop. Sometimes, like at Sentara Bayside Hospital, cupcake eaters were waiting when the pink truck arrived.

By the end of the day, only 21 cupcakes were left inside the pink truck.

And the sisters lived happily. Ever after? Too soon to tell. Next week, they’ll start all over again.

Lorraine Eaton, (757) 446-2697, lorraine.eaton@pilotonline.com