Homegrown Happy Valley

If you haven’t noticed, we’re kind of excited about Sugar on Top, the new cupcake cafe opening soon around the corner from Rita’s at 121 1/2 Beaver Avenue. (Read our recent post about the shop here.) So we’ve come up with a fun contest that will help promote the shop. Here’s how it works:

We challenge our readers to create the “Homegrown Happy Valley Cupcake,” a sweet or savory creation that showcases one or more local ingredients. Don’t worry about an actual recipe–just come up with the flavor combinations.

Sugar on Top brings the cupcake craze to State College in a shop that’s just as flavorful as its cupcakes.

The furniture, including a recliner that used to belong to an area hospital, comes from Craig’s List and the Penn State surplus store, while the walls of the 1,700 square foot space are painted pink and robin’s egg blue. The shop is the creation of Shaunda Lohse, a self-proclaimed “bohemian” who wears chipped nailed polish and red cheetah pants—and pulls it off.

Once upon a time there were two hens.

The first is Battery Hen. “I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings,” writes Karen Davis, President of United Poultry Concerns in Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection. “I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet.”