Best of Cleveland: Colossal Cupcakes
There’s something whimsical and unique about the decor of the Colossal Cupcakes locations in downtown Cleveland and North Olmsted. The stores are filled with vibrant pink painted walls, oversized pink chairs, chairs that look like ice cream cones and bubblegum machines each containing bubblegum ball colors like blue, purple and green to name a few. Bright blue and purple swirled frosting pops out from the vibrant oversized cupcakes in the display cases.
“Our cupcakes are unique in that they’re colossal not just in size but in flavor and toppings,” owner Kelly Kandah said. “People are buying a whole dessert when they buy a cupcake from us. If it’s a peanut butter cup cupcake, it’s loaded with tons of crushed peanut butter cups on top and we’re always over frosting. Everything in colossal is colossally.”
Kandah, a Cleveland native, is not a baker by trade. She went to school for journalism and was living in New York when the cupcake craze started. She got her inspiration from her mom and grandmother who were home bakers.
“My whole life, everyone always wanted them to do cakes and when cupcakes became popular, cupcakes because of their recipes,” Kandah said.
Kandah has always had a sweet tooth and would go to a jumbo cupcake store after work in New York. When she would return to Cleveland for the holidays, she would notice there wasn’t really anything like that in Cleveland.
The cupcake stores that Cleveland did have did not have very many flavors and would sell out quickly, meaning you had to be there bright and early to get cupcakes.
“I’ve always wanted to own a business and I already knew that I had a product that was very good and there was high demand for it with my mom and grandma’s recipes,” Kandah said. “I decided I wanted to come home and come back to Cleveland. There wasn’t much available in Cleveland for my career in television, so I thought I would open up a cupcake shop instead.”
Owning a small business has not been easy. Last year, Kandah went through an extremely difficult time when Colossal Cupcakes downtown location fell victim to the May 2020 riots that took place after the death of George Floyd. Rioters threw bricks and tools, shattering the glass on the windows and doors and damaging the walls in the store. The damage was so extensive that it took Kandah ten months to rebuild and the location officially reopened on March 29, 2021.
“It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and it still is,” Kandah said. “We’re still getting into the groove of things at the downtown store.”
Kandah said the whole process was like restarting her business over, but it took her 10 years to build her business to where it was, which made it a lot harder than the initial opening.
“I sort of had to start from scratch and bring everything in,” Kandah said. “I had to make a lot of decisions when we did the upgrades. I had to make changes now and it was almost like redecorating which I hadn’t planned on doing.”
Kandah said it was hard because she hadn’t planned for this. It was a hard thing to go through to let go of what the store once was and rebuild to how she wants it now.
It’s been difficult because Kandah has a new staff which not only involves training them how to sell the cupcakes, but also how to make the cake shakes and use new equipment.
“It’s reopening with much more than I initially opened with because it was a progression of colossal expanding over time and this was redoing everything at once,” Kandah said. “It was very difficult and it’s still going to be difficult. Our full menu isn’t going yet, so we have a lot ahead of us. But, we want to at least be open with some cupcakes and ice cream for now.”
One of the menu items unique to Colossal Cupcakes is the cake shakes which is ice cream and cake blended together.
The idea for the cake shakes came about in an interesting way. Someone had left a Ninja Mixer in the empty store space and the day before opening Kandah ordered ice cream. Kandah needed something on the menu board besides cupcakes and coffee.
“I was just kind of being funny and I threw a cupcake in a blender with a pint of vanilla ice cream and it was amazing,” Kandah said.
Out of the 40 flavor options, the most popular cupcake flavor no matter what time of year is the decadent red velvet cupcakes. They are so popular that the store makes a double batch of them each day.
Visiting Colossal Cupcakes is an exciting experience not only in the great tasting cupcakes, but with the atmosphere of the stores as well.
“If you come inside the store, it’s an experience in itself,” Kandah said. “There’s really cool seating and we have vending machines where everything inside of them is gold. Especially in Cleveland, people are always looking for unique things to do and I think both of our shops definitely have something for every age.”
