Photos by Marla Diamond/WCBS 880

I met some friends today for breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien on 64th Street and Lexington Avenue, NYC. After breakfast I decided to take a stroll down Lexington Avenue to Bloomingdale’s. By the time I got to 61st. and Lex, I saw a line of people across the street waiting to use a machine in a store-front window marked Cupcake ATM.

I thought the whole scene seemed a little unusual so I marched myself across Lex to take a closer look. My payoff was a big chuckle and the content for this blog post. The new Sprinkles Cupcakes added an automated feature that apparently was a crowd pleaser. The cupcake store now has a 24-hour digital dispensing machine inserted in a window that offers red velvet, peanut buttercup, lemon meringue. and Cuban coffee cupcakes at $4.25 each. Sprinkles Cupcakes is headquartered in Beverly Hills.

I found it amusing that a digital cupcake concept was such a big hit on the upper East Side of Manhattan where everyone is supposed to be so weight conscious. I asked a few local friends what they thought about this neighborhood addition.

Guess what? They were all customers. Apparently, eating a cupcake outside of a store window is just like picking food off of someone else’s plate. The calories don’t count.

When I got home today, I discovered that the Wall Street Journal did a video story on Cupcake ATM. Click here to start salivating.

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