Cupcake Bakery Honors Loved One

By Audrey Esther, News9.com INsite Team 

OKLAHOMA CITY -- After 18-year-old Sara Brinson died of sudden cardiac arrest, her family opened a cupcake bakery in her honor.

"Sara was very sweet and quiet and a great great niece," Sara's aunt and Sara Sara Cupcakes owner Toni Hoffman said.

Sara and Toni often baked cupcakes together.

"My family is really crazy and gregarious and she was really the shy one, so it gave us something to do," said the cupcake bakery owner.

On Easter of 2007 while baking a batch of vanilla cupcakes, Sara said to Toni that someday they'd open up a cupcake bakery. Toni promised to make it a reality one day.

The next day Sara Brinson died of sudden cardiac dysrhythmia. Months after Sara had died Hoffman remembered their last conversation.

"I got the whole family together and talked about opening a cupcake bakery and calling it 'Sara Sara'," her aunt said.

Sara Sara Cupcakes, located on NW 9th St., is now open for business and has proven to be bigger than just a cupcake bakery.

"It just turned out to be a great opportunity for our family to be together and spend time together and sort of work through the grieving process of losing Sara," Hoffman said.

That is especially true for Toni's sister and Sara's mother, Dana Brinson.

"Sara was the most special person I've ever known," Sara's mother said. "There's a million things a day that remind me of her, but this is a place I can go that is something that she wanted to do."

Like a good recipe requires a little of this and a little of that, it took several family members with backgrounds in this and that to build the bakery inside a 103-year-old remodeled house.  

"Everybody had a small part," Sara's aunt Toni said. "Everybody took their strengths whatever they thought they could do and added to the business."

Including one of Toni's cousin's who owns a restaurant in Chicago and created all 18 original cupcake recipes.

Stop in for seasonal cupcakes like peppermint patty and pecan pie, but on the menu year round is Sara's Cinnamon Roll.  

"When you peal off the paper it's like the one in the middle. So that would be my favorite one," Sara's mother said.  

Dana said she thanks her sister for keeping her promise to her daughter and for keeping her daughter's memory alive.

"I think when you loose a loved one people eventually stop saying (their) name and now they're saying it twice when they call for Sara Sara," Brinson said.

You can help keep Sara Brinson's memory alive by donating to the Sara Caroline Brinson-Children's Heart Research Fund, and by stopping in for a cupcake in her honor.