I’m mildly obsessed with cupcakes. Eating them and the idea of them. When I say the idea of them, I’m talking about all that a cupcake represents.

Carolina Cupcakery

Cupcakes are as dynamic in meaning as a complex dish is in flavor. A great dish turns on your palate at multiple points. Sweet and sour. Sweet and savory. Sweet and bitter. A cupcake, while being just sweet to the taste, turns on your emotions instead, and at multiple points.

They’re cute; they’re the only choice to send a child to school with on his birthday. They’re comforting; they make a sick person feel well if just for a moment, they make the house smell like a home, and they say you’re sorry in a way you can’t. They’re sinful; able to seduce, and melt upon indulgence. Add they’re celebratory; nothing makes a day feel more special than any other day like a luscious little cupcake.

In recent years, cupcakes have come back in a big way, “as blogs and bakeries have devoted themselves to its pleasures,” writes George Musser in this month’s Scientific American. “Some attribute this renewed popularity to the cupcake-indulging characters of HBO’s Sex and the City, and food historian Susan Purdy also credits dietary awareness: you can have your low-calorie cake and eat it, too. But true connoisseurs needed no moment of rediscovery. They never forgot what it was like to be six.”

In Hampton Roads a trifecta of cupcakeries have appeared in the last several months; Carolina Cupcakery in Chesapeake, Coco’s Cupcakery at the Oceanfront, and Just Cupcakes in Hilltop. I’d been to the former two and heard many good things about the latter (also the newest) from my sister and neice, who are also cucake connoisseurs. So when owner Carla Peay Hesseltine invited us to the shop, we just about dropped everything and made the trip.

The bakery is located in Hilltop West, a perfect reach for the Fresh Market-shopping “Hilltop mom.” It is a pink and white confection in and of itself. Like a cupcake, it’s tiny but packed with sweetness– big, ruffly, pink paper peonies hang in the window, ceramic cupcakes line the walls, and white, textured lamps hang over the counter. A pink barn door from Hesseltine’s West Virginia farm, separates the retail space from the bakery in back. Heady jazz–Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone–plays over the little bistro tables. Hesseltine, who used to own a graphic design and advertising firm, certainly impacted the brand with her own chic aesthetic and endearing personality.

Just Cupcakes owner Carla Peay Hesseltine

She is easily beautiful, with golden blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and a natural smile; someone you could guess might have been a pageant queen once but has a sense of humor about it. Everything about her is decidedly feminine; her presence is somehow maternal, but also classy and a little precious. Despite all that, as I found out when the stream of customers slowed enough to talk, Hesseltine is a confident businesswoman.

“The good thing about it being my shop,” I overheard her tell a customer to whom she insisted on giving a discount, even though he forgot his coupon, “is I do what I want.”

After losing faith in her financial advisers, she decided to put a little stock into her own instincts. Armed with heirloom recipes from her mother, grandmother and Great Aunt Spicie; two years of research into the business of making cupcakes; and enough starting capital to invest in herself and her passion, she opened Just Cupcakes on July 11, the day of her daughter’s birthday.

Everything at Just Cupcakes is fresh and homemade, inspired by the Slow Food movement. Cupcakes are baked every four hours. Whatever is left over at the end of the day is donated to a local charity. And the ingredients are as high quality as one could put in a cupcake, with real coconut shavings, for instance, and apples from a local Virginia farm.

“The way I grew up on the farm in West Virginia, everything we ate was always the freshest,” said Hesseltine. “So here our ingredients are the best you can get; the best that money can buy. None of our cupcakes has more than eight to ten ingredients, because we use real butter, real cream and real chocolate. Even our sprinkles are from real chocolate shavings.”

Anna Carlisle--three and a half, from Virginia Beach--picks the M&M cupcake

But while her baking style is somewhat traditional, Hesseltine’s business savvy is certainly new school. Her website is elegantly designed; Just Cupcakes’ Facebook page has over 500 fans (which she told us with sincere excitement), she Twitters and blogs (or at least her staff does). In October she’ll start delivering.

“And this year, we’re the official cupcake of the Miss Virginia pageant!” she happily reported. “Although my daughter said, ‘Great Mom, you’re gonna make cupcakes for people who are not going to eat them.”

It seems Just Cupcakes is off to a sweet start.

“So what’s your perfect cupcake?” I asked her. “Your dream cupcake? Have you made it yet?” I was ready for her to tell me about some great, surprising flavor, like the sweet and savory orange-carrot blend that Just Cupcakes has perfected.

“I had a lady come in here one day, and she said to me, ‘I need a cupcake right now.’ I asked her what was the occasion, and she told me, ‘I just got laid off today.’ When I tried to give her the cupcake on the house, she insisted she wanted to pay for it. But I told her, ‘Listen, you take this one. And as soon as you find a new job, you can come back and buy one to celebrate.

“I get to be a part of important moments in people’s lives,” she told me. “Customers come in here and buy cupcakes to bring to the hospital. They come in here to cheer themselves up.

“Those to me are the perfect cupcake.”