Sprinkles Founder on Guest DJ

Depending on how you feel about cupcakes, you can either praise or blame Candace Nelson for the cupcake craze. She’s the founder of Sprinkles and she’s KCRW’s Guest DJ this week. One of her track selections is a Lionel Ritchie song, which she says is directly connected to her baking career:

“When this song was popular I was actually living in Southeast Asia. My family lived overseas for a lot of my young life. And I was living in Medan, Sumatra, of all places. As a preteen, I was desperate for American culture, pop culture, or culture of any sort — whether that be food, like cupcakes and chocolate chip cookies or music like Lionel Richie. You couldn’t walk more than 10 ft in Indonesia without hearing this song blaring from a sauté cart or a store or a café.

And the great thing about it was, in Indonesia at the time, there were these vast stores of pirated cassette tapes which of course is a huge no-no. But I was so excited about it because I could go into the stores and mom and dad said “Pick out 10!!” They were so inexpensive. Of course nyou’d get them home and there would be typos in the credits and recording quality wouldn’t be that great but my music collection was vast. Anyway, my thirst for pop culture was easy to access there, with cheap music. My thirst for American goodies, not so much. I had to bake them all myself, so that was sort of the beginning of my baking career back then.”

Check it out, after the jump…

1. Mary J. Blige – Family Affair

2. Lionel Richie – Dancing on the Ceiling

3. Cyndi Lauper – All through the Night

4. Rooney – When did your heart go missing?

5. Bill Withers – Lovely Day