The line starts as early as 6 a.m. and goes around the block. People wait for hours in the rain. Some of them cry when it doesn’t work out. Online, millions tune in to videos for the pretty colors and distinct sounds.
The frenzy is all for a few spoonfuls of dessert in a cup known as the dotcake, a simple confection topped with frosting and nonpareil sprinkles exported from Long Island to Butterfield Market locations in New York. It tastes a lot like cake from a mix.
“People say it’s just cake and sprinkles, because it is just cake and sprinkles,” said Alex Posner, 27, an owner of the Dotcakes, a bakery in Roslyn, N.Y., who created the baked good and sells it to Butterfield.
Simple as they are, over the last month, dotcakes have exploded into a social media phenomenon. There are customized dotcakes for life events like weddings, engagements and bar mitzvahs, and for every Hallmark holiday. There are copycats from other bakeries and grocery stores. Already, there are endless interpretations — dotcake ice cream, doughnuts, bagels and even manicures.
On a recent Friday afternoon at the Long Island bakery, Jonathan Leest, 21, of Plainview, N.Y., and Jenna Velez, 21, of East Northport, N.Y., were in line with about two dozen people. The pair had organized a day of TikTok tourism.
They reminisced about viral foods of yore, like Unicorn Frappuccinos from Starbucks and Crumbl Cookies. “We used to wait on lines much longer than this,” Leest said.
Those who manage to acquire one are often eager to recreate what has become a dotcake cliché: running a spoon over the hard, sprinkle-paved surface, oohing at the sound, then digging into the individually-portioned desserts, which come in vanilla, chocolate, red velvet, vanilla chocolate chip, and funfetti flavors.
They seem tailor made for the TikTok era, with their tidy circle of colorful packed sprinkles, and the teeth-cracking crunch that serves as a kind of A.S.M.R. There’s the nostalgic familiarity of a classic frosted cake, and if you’d rather not wait in line, it’s easy enough to make at home. (And perhaps more cost effective — dotcakes cost $8 a cup in Roslyn, $11 if you’re in Manhattan.)
“It’s a multisensory experience,” said Alexa Matthews, a food influencer and the director of marketing at Butterfield Market, the only retailer in the city that sells the Dotcakes’s products. She added, “That’s what’s taking it to the next level.”
Butterfield Market, an upscale grocer, often sells foods that are trendy or become internet sensations — think $300 Crown melons from Japan, or their beloved soft-serve frozen yogurt. The store has given cake samples to some content creators, which may have pushed the popularity of dotcake over the edge.
Are they worth the hype? “Everyone online just said it tastes like Betty Crocker,” the influencer Lucie Rauschnabel said in a recent video, where she recreated a version at home.
“There’s a little bit of an eye-roll element to the fact that this cake went viral,” said Carmel Hagen, the founder of the baking ingredient company Supernatural. But it may be traveling widely because it’s not tricky to D.I.Y.: “You don’t find that many people making their own cronut,” Hagen said.
The most polarizing aspect of the dotcake may be the type of sprinkle that has catapulted to fame alongside it. It’s not the soft sprinkle or jimmy that has graced many an ice cream cone or funfetti cake. It’s the nonpareil — the hard, round bauble that was previously a wallflower of the baking aisle.
Rainbow soft sprinkles from Supernatural are typically Amazon’s best seller in the dessert sprinkles category. But for five days in May, Hagen said, the brand’s nonpareils took that spot. Before dotcakes became a social media phenomenon, Hagen said, they rarely broke the Top 20.
“Nonpareils are an inferior sprinkle,” said Molly Yeh, a cookbook author and TV host who uses sprinkles in many of her recipes. “They’re just kind of overly crunchy and don’t have that much flavor.” She prefers the softer, chewy kind.
Of course, a frosted cake with sprinkles is not so novel. Online commenters have pointed out the similarities between dotcakes and a Mexican cortadillo — a simple cake with pink frosting and nonpareil sprinkles. For years, the dotcakes have been mainstays of celebrations of college acceptance.
Posner sells around 3,000 “dotcups” a week, plus 50 to 70 custom orders each day, including some painstaking designs, and has at least 100 different colors of sprinkles to choose from. When she started Dotcakes in 2017 as a high school student working out of her parents home, “the point wasn’t the cake, it was the decoration,” she said, citing pointillism and its totemic artist, Georges Seurat, as inspiration. “And now the point is the cake.”
Gabriella Gershenson is a reporter contributing to the Styles section.
The post What Are All Those People Waiting in Line for? Cake in a Cup. appeared first on New York Times.
