Find out what Riverwest tastes like in cake form at Milwaukee Cupcake Company

After nearly two decades in a high-stress career as a partner at an executive search firm and years of dreaming about opening a café with business partner Lynn Kobussen, Debbie Gale decided to strap on an apron and hit the kitchen. "I thought about going to culinary school, but I'm impatient,” she says with a laugh. “I'm a doer, I just want to do!" And do she will starting this Saturday, when Gale and Kobussen open the Milwaukee Cupcake Company in the Third Ward (316 N. Milwaukee Street, 414-467-9957).

Before taking her first leap into the unknown, Gale told The A.V. Club that she decided to hunker down and get some behind-the-scenes knowledge about the business side of baking. "I actually worked for Panera Bread for a while, doing catering and baking there—just to learn more about working for a larger company, ways to be more productive, and other things like that.  It was very helpful."  It didn't take long for demand to overwhelm what had started as a part-time venture, and Milwaukee Cupcake Company was born. “I was baking out of a rented kitchen in St. Francis, but I decided that it was time to look for a space, to break out on my own,” she says. “So Lynn and I agreed that it was time."

Many of the cupcakes are inspired by Milwaukee neighborhoods, like the Riverwest, a cookies-and-cream concoction that has “more of a young-at-heart flavor," or The North Shore, which has a “polished, suburban mother in her mansion kind of look to it," Gale explains. MCC also has cupcakes inspired by local businesses, like the aptly-christened Stone Creek, a rich mocha cake with espresso from Stone Creek Coffee Roasters, and the Rishi Matcha, a brightly colored and delicately flavored green tea cake made with Rishi's 2009 World Tea Championship-winning matcha powder and crowned with candied ginger.

Milwaukee Cupcake Company will be open at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Let them that you’ll be attending by RSVPing at their Facebook page.