A TREASURE TROVE OF SWEETNESS

       A downtown bakery offers the best things in life
       Outgoing and articulate, she smiles in excitement and spreads out her arms to include the entire room.
       "I designed this shop to invite people inside, to enjoy good things, to relax, to savour the joys of a good cup of coffee and a cupcake," she says.
       You wouldn't call Manora "Sophie" Prommarin demure. She is hardly, after all, the picture of a typical Thai lady.
       Yet, she insists, "I'm Thai. I'm really Thai".
       Born in Bangkok 30 - something years ago, Sophie was taken, at a very young age, to the States, where very young age, to the States, where her father continued his education in computer science. Her family, which includes one older brother, has remained extremely conservative, she says.
       "We spoke Thai at home," she remembers. Her parents taught her Thai culture, from the way a good Thai child behaves to Thai classical dancing
       Sophie herself learned about her native country almost at a distance, although she and her family travelled back and forth between Thailand and the States regularly to visit relatives. She ended up loving Thai culture and history so much that, when she was 19, she set up her very own tour company to take tourists to the important cultural destinations of her country.
       She would take small groups all around the country, happy to show them what she loves about Thailand.
       After operating the company for a few years, she joined the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel at Dana Point, just a few miles from her home. For this 350-room hotel located on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Sophie worked as an event organiser, involved with all sorts of activities from weddings to annual general meetings to birthday perties.
       "This was the best company I could have joined," Sophie says enthusiastically. "I learned so much."
       After 10 years or so, she left to start her own event planning company, which "morphed" into a production. "We took care of all sorts of planning aspects," she says.
       Thailand was calling her, though. "I just wanted to come back to live here for a while, to find my roots," she says.
       About five years ago, she returned, looking for something she could do. She found it.
       She opened a little shop she called Sparkles, offering cakes, cookies, coffee, tea and smoothies. She designed everything, from the way the walls, ceiling and displays would look to the comfortable seats.
       "I love to design," she smiles. "I love to be inspred."
       She also loves cooking and baking. "At home in the States, I prepared the food for all the family gettogethers," she says. To work off energy, she would bake. (How she stays so slim with all those cholesterol-busters around is a mystery.)
       On any day, she's baked 13 or 14 kinds of cupcakes and cookies. The cupcakes sport exotic names like "diamond" (vanilla) and "Black diamond" (chocolate), "sapphire" (blueberry) and "fire opal" (carrot and raisin).
       The American-style cookies, so big and soft, have tasty combinations - apple surprise, with caramel chocolate, cinnamon and white chocolate, or oatmeal with cranberries, chocolate chip raisins or nut, and pumpkin chocolate chip squares. Sophie bakes fresh every day, using the freshest, highest-quality ingredients she can find. Those cranberries are fresh, as are all the berries and other fruits she uses.
       "All my products are the real thing," she smiles.
       She offers catering services and even event planning (of course). She can also provide, by special order, cookies for doggies.
       Enter the little shop on Sukhumvit Soi 53, and you see an unusual interior design - walls painted a powder blue decorated with mottoes painted in silver. Look at the ceiling and enjoy Sophie's concept of the stars, all sparkly and glittery.
       Shelves hold non-bakery goods for sale, t-shirts and knickknacks, all hand-made by people Sophie knows.
       She's already started decorating the shop for the holidays, too. On one wall, she's painted a tree in silver. Its branches are bare, but as the gift-giving season nears, she'll hang ornaments on the wall where the branches are painted.
       Every day, as she bakes, her mind is constantly searching for new combinations of cupcakes and cookies, new designs that complement her own design concepts for her little shop.
       She's also planning on expanding to other locations. This shop, she says sadly, has no parking, but it's perfect for walk-in customers, passers- by who stroll past and then suddenly back up as soon as they realise that they've just seen all that good stuff in her window.
       Raised abroad but firmly rooted in Thailand now, she laughs again. It's ture, she admits, that her Thai-woman friends tell her that she seems "very powerful", but Thai women, she points out, she powerful, more powerful than they might realise.
       For her, Sparkles is much more than the name of her shop. "It stands for joy and for lover of all the good things in life," she says. "In the end, it stands for hope."