Annalie Perkins removes a cupcake (coconut!) from the Sprinkles ATM while Neeki Mashkat awaits her turn.

-- Leigh Singleton | The Ledger

You certainly don’t have to look far to find amazing baked goods in Nashville.

Scratch-made pies, cobblers and banana pudding can be found at any meat-n-three or barbecue joint worth its salt; upscale bakeries, heritage bakeries and even vegan bakeries make their homes here. The pastry game in this town is worth paying attention to.

Then again, there’s always room for one more. And as a city accustomed to stardom, we’re quite comfortable welcoming a bona fide cupcake celebrity into the fold.

With its just-in-time-for-Christmas opening, the L.A.-based Sprinkles Cupcakes officially started selling their signature cupcakes with the distinctive concentric circle design in 12South, next door to Draper James.

Sprinkles gets into the game with style: It was one of the first cupcake-centric bakeries in the country and is generally credited with kicking off the cupcake craze.

They also claim to have opened the world’s first cupcake truck, and certainly their 24-hour cupcake ATM – which also opened at The Gulch location at 2606 12th Ave. S. – is a first.

It’s also a good thing to know about in the event of any after-hours cupcake emergencies. God knows we’ve all had one of those, amirite?

Nashville, one of just 18 locations nationwide, is getting the full Sprinkles experience. Since its flagship store opened in 2010, Sprinkles has expanded beyond cupcakes into ice cream and cookies.

That means a full gamut of sweet treats like sundaes, floats, malts and ice cream sandwiches; fun combos like a shot of espresso and a kid’s scoop of ice cream, easily paired with a cookie; and interesting flavors like chai latte or Cuban coffee cupcakes; salted oatmeal cornflake cookies; and Cap’n Crunch ice cream, in addition to the classics.

Flavors rotate by day, week, month and season, and the Sprinkles.com website offers a helpful flavor chart.

There are vegan, gluten-free and sugar-free options, and even pupcakes for your canine companions.

This spring, Sprinkles will launch a Perks program, with sweet rewards offered for different levels of Perks-dom. (Although I would humbly ask my friends to stage an intervention and a few shots of insulin should I rise to Red Velvet level, which you can only reach with 40-plus visits a year.)

Now, I know what you’re thinking. So let me shoot down your pre-conceived objections one at a time:

Yes, Sprinkles is a chain in a city that loves its independent food scene.

But it’s a small chain, and a chain I feel compelled to love since it’s responsible for the dawn of the Age of Cupcakes.

Many a food writer delights in proclaiming, “X is the new cupcake. Cupcakes are dead! Long live the X!”

Listen, macarons, cronuts and pake (that’s a pie baked inside a cake, in case you were wondering) all have a place at the dessert table.

But so do cupcakes. Frankly, in my house, they never left the table.

Cupcakes are evil.

They are cake, and therefore making us constantly fatter in a city already fraught with obesity problems.

Listen: Cupcakes aren’t evil; cupcakes can thwart evil.

MI6 actually replaced bomb recipes with cupcake recipes on an al Qaeda recruitment site in 2011, so there.

Moderation, people. I haven’t mastered it yet myself, but one day…

Ok, now that you have no reason not to, please go out and give Sprinkles a sprinkling of your treat budget.

You can still show all your pastry love to your local pastry geniuses (I know I plan to), but you know we can always fit one more at the table.

Besides, with 80 people a day moving to Nashville, we definitely need to spread around the bakery love.

As I’m sure John Lennon would’ve agreed, all we are saying is give Sprinkles a chance.