To see little Atticus teeter around his living room with arms outstretched toward his Cozy Coupe, you can understand why his mom thinks he's just the icing on her (cup)cake.
It was the thought of missing moments like these that pushed the former owner of Spa City Cupcakes to hang up her apron and hang out with her year-old son.
Rachel St. Martin, along with her husband Joe, baked up the right recipe for specialty-flavored cupcakes and fed a clientele hungry for their $2.75 desserts for a year and a half in Saratoga Springs, but recently sold their business to put family first.
The young couple moved from New York City in 2007 to be closer to Joe's family. Both of them had worked in public relations. Rachel had commuted from home a few times a week when her company wanted her to focus on what her next step would be career-wise. She knew that to climb the corporate ladder would mean spending increasingly more time away from home. So, she left.
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The couple saw the moment as an opportunity for Rachel to realize a longtime dream to open her own cupcake shop.
"We had been practicing and looking into it forever beforehand. It just wasn't ever the right timing. I think that's what holds a lot of people back - that right moment, what's going to work for them. We just made it the right moment for us," she said.
In June 2008, Rachel, 29, started Spa City Cupcakes with sometimes as many as 20 different flavors in their repertoire, like their popular peanut butter cup, s'mores, and Lady in Red Velvet.
She incorporated one recipe from her Italian "nonna" for her "gob" cupcake - an equivalent of a whoopee pie. The dessert had an overfilled vanilla center with a little cupcake "hat" and was sprinkled with sugar.
"It looked so cute and the filling was delicious. Having that was like having a piece of my family at the shop," Rachel said.
It was love at first bite for many patrons and soon the young couple expanded to a larger space a few shops from where they had been in the Downstreet Marketplace.
Like many business owners, they put in many hours to make the cupcake shop work.
Joe, who worked full-time from home, would leave Porter Corners to help at the shop from 6 to 8:30 in the morning, drive back home and work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and then drive back to Saratoga Springs to help Rachel clean up. Many times they didn't grab dinner until 8 p.m.
"Looking back it sounds a lot crazier but when you're in the moment it's just what we did," Rachel said.
Though they were closed on Monday, invariably they were shopping or doing something for the business.
Eventually, Rachel became pregnant with Atticus but thought she would be able to balance a new baby, a husband and her fledgling business. She planned to take four weeks off after he was born before returning to work.
"It's the biggest cliche, but baby changes everything," Rachel said.
Her plan of going back to work,
especially in four weeks, was completely scrapped. She was smitten with her newborn and didn't want to leave him. She gave herself time to see if she would change her mind over the winter, when they were open on weekends only.
Come spring, she hadn't budged.
The couple decided to sell the popular business. Ultimately, Rachel said, parting with the cupcake shop was motivated partly by guilt.
"Every moment that I wasn't doing something for the shop, I felt it so bad because it was a baby, in a sense, to me and there were all these plans I had, but you can't focus one hundred percent on the shop and have these huge ideas when all of my attention was going to (Atticus)."
The St. Martins are proud of having developed their concept into a thriving business but acknowledged it was time to nurture their family.
"I think it came to a point where the trade-off wasn't worth it. I think it became easier because it stopped feeling as much ours as it once did. (Rachel) being with (Atticus) was more important than her being at the shop," Joe said.
The couple felt someone else could focus exclusively on the shop and grow it even more, and they wanted to make sure whoever took over would continue the tradition of the cupcakes.
A new owner is now renovating the interior of the shop.
Atticus was seated in his highchair eating banana slices and playing a game of "pickup the juice cup" with his mother on a recent morning. The couple's days begin early, perhaps even earlier than when they owned the cupcake shop and the evenings stretch on beyond 8 p.m. at times.
Rachel and Joe are still whipping up new creations in the kitchen, only without the feedback from adoring cupcake connoisseurs. And down the line, they would like to tackle another business.
Rachel said she misses hearing about her customer's lives - whether they were buying cupcakes as a way to pop the question of marriage or to cheer up someone - but that the decision to walk away was a good one for them.
"The cupcake (business) is something we made together but nothing can compete with our baby," she said.
