Dining

Sprinkles Cupcakes brings 24-hour cupcakes to the Linq in Las Vegas

Step right up to the cupcake ATM

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The Sprinkles sandwich. You wish you’d thought of it first.

When Mick Jagger said, “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” he probably wasn’t talking about cupcakes, but it certainly applies to the menu at the new Sprinkles bakery at the Linq.

Candace Nelson opened Sprinkles in California in 2005. She swears by the rocky road ice cream made with Chuao chocolate and homemade marshmallow.

The Beverly Hills-based shop is famous for selling fresh-baked cupcakes in flavors like chai latte, peanut butter chocolate and triple cinnamon, and for transforming those treats into even more decadent creations, like the Sprinkles sundae ($6.75), which splits the cupcake of your choice in half and adds a scoop of ice cream in the middle. Cupcakes a la mode—why didn’t we think of that?

Of course, we also didn’t think of the Sprinkles sandwich (two cupcake tops with a scoop of ice cream for $6.75) or of owner Candace Nelson’s pink cupcake ATM, a 24-hour, digital, cupcake-providing device that will serve hundreds of sweets daily to impatient (and perhaps intoxicated) Linq patrons. The shop itself will stay open until midnight Sunday-Wednesday and until 1 a.m. Thursday-Saturday, so you can drunk munch on dark chocolate cupcakes, instead of hitting the drive-thru on the way home.

Twenty-four hour cupcake ATM? Yes. Really.

Nine years after opening the first Sprinkles, Nelson says she’s still drawn to the shop’s guilt-inducing pleasures, although these days, she’s more likely to sneak a salted oatmeal cornflake cookie or a cone of rocky road than a red velvet cupcake ($3.75). That classic is one of the bakery’s most popular orders, but Nelson recommends the banana cupcake with vanilla or bittersweet chocolate frosting. “[It’s] probably the best cupcake that we do.”

The Linq outpost is Nelson’s 15th national shop, and while the former investment banker says she’s focused on expanding across the U.S., Sprinkles will also open a location in Kuwait this April. Actually, it’s Kuwait’s second Sprinkles outpost.

“We found the right partner,” says Nelson of Alshaya, the franchise operator that also works with Shake Shack, Pinkberry and the Cheesecake Factory in the Middle East.

The first Kuwait store is about a year old, and Nelson says it’s doing well, although she did have to make some recipe adjustments to accommodate the new host country. Alcohol is illegal in Kuwait, and vanilla extract has trace alcohol in it, so the shop uses a powdered version instead. Nutmeg is also illegal in Kuwait, apparently because it can be an intoxicant in large quantities. So Nelson makes a substitution, and keeps the sweetness coming. Because cupcakes are worth overdoing—anywhere in the world.

Sprinkles The Linq, 733-0522. Sunday-Wednesday, 10 a.m.-midnight; Thursday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-1 a.m.

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