Some combos are too good to be sequestered. Peanut butter and chocolate. Prosciutto and melon. Cheddar cheese on apple pie. Watermelon, mint and feta. And as of this morning: Coffee and cupcakes.
But not separate; we’re talking coffee-infused little orbs of yumminess coming your way today from Jack’s Coffee and mini-cupcake queen, Baked by Melissa.
From Friday, May 15 to Tuesday, September 8 — that’s the entire summer in a cupcake liner (baking parlance for a nutshell) — Jack’s Coffee CEO Rakesh Chandiramani and Melissa Ben-Ishay, founder of the popular Dead Head, tie-dye-skewed mini-cupcake, multi-flavor empire Baked by Melissa, have banded together to create a trio of flavors that will roll out today at Jack’s Amagansett (146 Montauk Highway) and the second East End outpost of the coffee spot in Sag Harbor (117 Main Street.), including:
- Jack’s Cold Brew Cupcake – the cold-brew inspired coffee-spiked cake stuffed with coffee filling, topped with coffee icing, and finished with white chocolate sugar crystal brittle
- Iced Happy Jack Cupcake – for the morning danish lovers, honey-flavored cake stuffed with cinnamon filling, topped with coffee-cinnamon icing, and finished with cinnamon sugar white chocolate brittle, inspired by the Happy Jack, a honey-cinnamon latte
- Vanilla Cold Foam Cupcake – vanilla cake stuffed with vanilla cream and topped with vanilla icing – spun from the creamy notes of Jack’s cold foam
While Jack’s Coffee has been firmly rooted in the Hamptons since 2011, Baked by Melissa has never had a presence on the East End until this summer collab.
Jacke’s started in the West Village on 10th Street when Jack Mazzola, initially inspired by his grandmother’s home-cooking, discovered that to achieve the most full-flavored coffee he had to stir the grinds in the hot water. Thus, his “stir brew” method was born. Mazzola founded his first coffee shop in 2003, with a deeply ingrained, central focus on fair-trade, shade-grown organic coffee.
Baked by Melissa has an equally entrepreneurial origin story. When Ben-Ishay got fired from a low-level media-planning job back in the crush of 2008, she called her brother for some sibling comfort. A fan of her baking, the story goes: He told her not to worry about it and go home, make some cupcakes and they’d hatch a plan in the morning — that turned into Baked by Melissa, which now has 14 retail brick-and-mortars across New York City and New Jersey.
“We’ve always thought of Jack’s as more than just coffee – it’s a daily ritual,” said Chandiramani in a statement to the press. “This collaboration takes some of our most loved drinks and turns them into something fun and unexpected for the summer. It’s a great way to experience Jack’s in a completely new format.” And Baked by Melissa’s dreamy little cupcakes, too.
