Sugar Sweet Sunshine Sugar Sweet Sunshine 126 Rivington St. (betw. ...

Lately, I've wondered if dessert is one of the great myths of the American kitchen. I doubt that many people actually grew up eating it every night after dinner or opened the fridge with regularity to find a freshly cut layer cake communing with the alimentary staples like eggs, orange juice and milk.

Admittedly, my stance is fueled by my desire for sweets?I was rarely allowed dessert as a child, and I have fetishized and overindulged in them ever since. But I wonder if that ideal of a Betty Crocker cake was just as elusive to the rest of America as it was to me.

Undeniably, at some moment in our culture, the layer cake acquired such a powerful iconography that the image may have replaced the reality. We've all seen those two or three sandwiched rounds enveloped in cow-licked peaks of frosting in every refrigerator of every appliance commercial ever made, as well as on the barren kitchen counter of every sitcom family. But how often do they show up on ours?

These thoughts, after visiting Sugar Sweet Sunshine, a new Lower East Side bakery whose repertoire lies chiefly in the 50s American genre: layer cakes, icebox desserts, cupcakes, cream pies. The sight of the yellow-tinted Sunshine, fluffy coconut with meringue, three-layer red velvet and chocolate-frosted chocolate layer cakes all under shiny glass globes rendered other patrons and myself zombie-like, our eyes morphing into spinning pinwheels.

It didn't surprise me when I learned that Sugar Sweet Sunshine's owners are two former Magnolia employees. Much like that supremely popular retro bakery, Sugar Sweet Sunshine only speaks one language: Betty Crocker. Peggy Williams and Debra Weiner are the forces behind the chipper offspring, whose goodies are strikingly similar to their alma mater's.

For one, the ladies here smother their cupcakes with myriad shades of pastel frostings (Magnolia's number one claim to fame, although Sugar Sweet's are far more palatable), which sell weekly by the thousands. On a recent afternoon, I watched the girls ice in tandem. The flick of the wrist, the descending wad of butter cream that doubles the size of the tiny cupcake, it all looked so familiar.

"Certain colors sell better," says Williams, auburn-haired in a do-rag, mixing a moody shade of blue. The best-selling color, she says, is pink. "Male, female, they all want the pink. Peach never really sold so well?"

"You do get the purists who just want their white," interjects Weiner, wearing a green flowered barrette, doing double-duty in both pink and white. (In a fluke of nature, Weiner and Williams are as skinny as twigs. Cutting elfin figures at four-eleven and five-two, they could probably hulahoop in springform pans.)

After only a month in business, patrons lounging in the sherbet-hued space look as comfortable as if they were in their own living rooms. I notice this as I watch Peggy cut into a pale green pistachio bundt cake. One slice at Sugar Sweet Sunshine measures about a hectare. Now I understand why the folks here look so lazy and snug: If they're anything like me, they exercised zero self-control and ate the whole damn thing.

[gabi@nypress.com](mailto:gabi@nypress.com)