Ask her what bubble tea is and she won’t say it’s a flavored, tea-based drink with a tapioca topping, also known as boba. That’s what it is, but to the self-proclaimed boba prodigy who memorized all 100-something recipes in a day and a half when she began working at Boba Suite Tea House [9], it’s so much more.
She’ll tell you where bubble tea originated and what the tapioca pearls are made from. The boba contains sweet potato, cassava root and brown sugar, she’ll say. She’ll explain how it’s cooked, as well as affirm that the boba at Boba Suite comes straight from Taiwan, where the bubble tea fad began.
Sara Stedner, 23, of Napanoch, N.Y., is the manager at Boba Suite Tea House and a go-getter with a “really bubbly personality,” Glenda Nunez, the store's owner, said. Not only is Stedner an encyclopedia on bubble tea, she is also the in-house baker. Her captivating energy is perhaps the key ingredient in making the exotic cupcakes, like the cotton candy cupcake, sold at the tea house alongside tea drinks, yogurt drinks and smoothies, among many other choices.
Before Stedner became the baker roughly four months ago, Boba Suite bought cupcakes from an outside provider. After realizing the cupcakes could be made on-site for half the price, the Boba Suite staff thought, “You know what? We can just do it,” Stedner said. “Then we just took it over, and they’re fresh daily.”
Though miniature in size, Stedner’s cupcakes are as charismatic as she is. Honeydew, red velvet, chocolate mint, chocolate cappuccino, strawberry, citrus orange and taro are a few among her vast array of flavors.
“I just started throwing weird combinations together and then testing them out on people,” Stedner said. “Weird flavors that I didn’t think would sell, like cotton candy, sell really, really well.”
Her personal favorite is the maple vanilla cupcake, but because she dislikes desserts, she lets others be the judges. She’ll save the more experimental flavors for Boba Suite’s sample days, when the general public is invited to come in and taste a variety of drinks and baked goods, Nunez said.
Leah Favia, 23, of Putnam County, N.Y., is a recent graduate of Syracuse University and was a loyal customer of Boba Suite during her time in the city. She went to the tea house probably once every week and thought the place was wonderful, noting the good music, options for snacks and drinks, and the compassion of the people behind the counter.
Favia said she finds the Boba Suite cupcakes absolutely delicious — her favorite is the red velvet, but the more extraordinary cupcakes catch her attention, too.
“If it looks weird, I’ll probably try it,” she said. “I assume that it’s going to be tasty.”
Stedner’s baking gene runs in the family, and many recipes have been passed down from generation to generation. Cindy Stedner, Sara Stedner’s mom, decorates cakes herself and was described by her daughter as “the Betty Crocker of the house.”
“Every time I baked here at home, she was always in the batter with a big spoon, ever since she was little,” Cindy Stedner said. “She had more batter on her than in the cupcakes. … I’d have to actually pick her up and put her in the bathtub.”
Sara Stedner learned a great deal about baking from her mom. “She taught me a lot about how to make pies,” she said. “I’m like, a pie expert.”
Sara Stedner admitted her expertise is somewhat strange since she doesn’t eat pie, nor does she like cupcakes.
“She’s always really been that way, except when she was in the cake batter,” her mom said.
Cindy Stedner also said her daughter looks through the family cookbooks, selects a recipe and changes it. “She puts her own creativity into it,” she said.
That’s how Stedner is able to make the unusual frosting flavors for the cupcakes at Boba Suite. Since she hasn’t mastered the art of making frosting, she’ll use regular butter cream frosting and “jazz it up,” she said. She’ll create honeydew or taro-flavored frosting, for example, by mixing the powder used to flavor bubble tea drinks with the plain frosting.
Stedner also likes to draw, and her artistic abilities help her in decorating the cupcakes, Nunez said.
“The pretty designs that she makes for her drawings and paintings she can transfer over to her pastries,” she said.
Stedner does have plans to go to school to learn the basics, like how to make frosting and flowers out of frosting. She’s looking into Onondaga Community College [10] or a community college closer to Napanoch.
A little over a month ago, Stedner launched a line of truffles at Boba Suite. She tested the truffles out at the tea house's sample day in early May, and they were a huge hit, Nunez said.
Stedner also has other ideas for the tea house. “We’re looking into, later on, in the next couple years, getting a license for late-night Boba,” Stedner said. She said she hopes to offer margarita cupcakes, or cupcakes made with honeydew liqueur. However, that proposal is not at all official yet, she said.
Stedner’s goal is to open up her own pastry shop, though she said that would be much further down the line. Simply putting up a sign in Boba Suite clarifying that the cupcakes are homemade and that Stedner is the baker, though, has been a great way of getting her name out, Nunez said. Fairly recently, people have been asking her to cater.
But Stedner has no real plans to leave Boba Suite just yet. She loves working there.
“The workers don’t have to act like we’re in a dictatorship,” she said. “We can be friendly with the customers, we can laugh, make jokes."
“Here, we connect with everybody,” Stedner said. “We’re like a family. We treat each other like a sister or a brother, and it’s nice to know that everybody’s got my back and I have everybody else’s back.”
