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Yum Yum Cupcake rolls into Midtown

Cake-baker Nadia DeMessa is testing out Midtown as a location to sell her cupcakes.

Update: Nadia DeMessa said her first day selling cupcakes from a food truck went well. "It will get better the more people see me out there," she said Wednesday afternoon in a Twitter message. DeMessa will park her truck in Tech Square on Thursday, from noon to 1:30 p.m.

Midtowners get to test out a new food truck Wednesday when Nadia DeMessa parks her mobile cupcake operation on West Peachtree Street, between Ponce de Leon Avenue and 4th Street.

She expects to sell from noon until about 1:30 p.m. or she runs out. One cupcake is $2.75 with tax included. Follow her on Twitter (@yumyumcupcake) for updates.

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DeMessa has been running her company Yum Yum Cake Design since 2006, baking wedding and other special occasion cakes from scatch out of a commissary industrial kitchen in Decatur. Last year, she saw the potential in selling cupcakes from a truck and decided, "We have to hit the street."

So, she found a used truck on Craigslist in Orlando, where the Jamaica native spent her childhood, and received a Georgia Department of Agriculture street food permit. Yum Yum Cupcake was born.

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Up until now, she's sold only at festivals and private events. This week, she's experimenting with street locations around central Atlanta. On Thursday, she plans to park in Tech Square at 5th and Spring streets.

Eventually, she'd like to be hitting two spots per day, alerting people to her location via social media. "It's not like New York where we have hundreds of people (out walking). We're going to rely on Twitter," she said.

Because she packages each cupcake individually, as The King of Pops does his popsicles, she can skirt many of Atlanta's unusually restrictive laws for street food sellers. But, she said, individual packaging is time-consuming and an added expense.

DeMessa is a member of the Atlanta Street Food Coalition, which is trying to change city and county policies. The coalition is hosting a public "Street Food Summit" with Atlanta City Council member Kwanza Hall and Fulton County Commissioner Joan Garner on Saturday, April 9, from 10 a.m. to noon at Helene S. Mills Senior Center, 515 John Wesley Dobbs Ave. NE.

DeMessa's staple flavors are chocolate, peanut butter, vanilla and Red Velvet. On Wednesday, she'll also be bringing out batches of her rotating speciality cupcakes: orange creamsicle and tirimisu.

She's got a "huge list" of these rotating flavors, including strawberry daiquiri, mango, mint chocolate, pink lemonade, carrot, sweet potato and Boston cream pie. But she'll test out new ones "as they pop up in my head."

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