Photo: Kirbie Cravings.
This is one of many ways people make cake in a cup. The article mentions using nonpareils on top, but some bakers use sprinkles, as here.
Because my older granddaughter likes to make a “mug cake” when there’s nothing sweet in the house for dessert, I was fascinated to read about Alex Posner, a woman who started a mug cake craze when she was only a teen.
Gabriella Gershenson writes at the New York Times, “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. … Already, there are endless interpretations — dotcake ice cream, doughnuts, bagels and even manicures. …
”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 [Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response]. 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. …
“ ‘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. … 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. …
“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. …
“Posner sells around 3,000 ‘dotcups’ a week, plus 50 to 70 custom orders each day. … 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.’ ”
FYI: Coco doesn’t use a cake mix.
Coco’s Chocolate Chip Mug Cake
(Sometimes she calls it a Mug Cookie)
1 tbsp salted butter, melted
Add 1 tbsp brown sugar & 1 tbsp white sugar.
Mix.
Add 1 egg yolk and & 1 tsp vanilla.
Mix
Add 2 tbsp flour.
Mix well.
Mix in as many chocolate chips as you like.
Microwave for 45-60 seconds.
More at the Times, here.
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