Let them eat Dot Cakes.
New Yorkers and tourists are lining up for hours for the newest viral sensation. Propelled by TikTok and Instagram, demand for Dot Cakes — round little confections in a cup topped with a layer of multicolor nonpareil sprinkles that the social media masses find inexplicably thrilling — has reached insane levels.
At Butterfield Market — the exclusive purveyor in NYC for the treats, which come from a Roslyn, NY, bakery called The Dot Cakes, — they receive 600 cakes at each of its two locations every Wednesday and Saturday and sell out within two hours. On social media, posts about the treats attract hundreds of thousands and even millions of views.
One influencer, Danielle Pheloung, 29, posted a TikTok video six days ago that’s amassed seven million views. In it, she says the Dot Cakes are “the best thing I’ve ever had in my entire life.”
I’m truly sorry for her if that’s true.
The sludgy confections are unspeakably awful. They’re the creepiest foodstuffs I’ve tasted from Long Island, land of my long-ago youth, since a bucket of seriously stale popcorn at a drive-in movie circa 1964.
Each 8-ounce Dot Cake costs $11 and has three elements: cake at the bottom, a thin white frosting layer above it, and, on top, the famous rainbow sprinkles. They come in four basic flavors: “classic white,” vanilla chip, red velvet and chocolate.
The “classic white” Dot Cake didn’t say “vanilla” because there was none, as per ingredients in microscopic type on the cup bottom. The cake portion tasted only of artificial flavors. No wonder, ingredients include a none-too-appetizing elixir of sodium silicoaluminate, monocalcium phosphate, sorbitan monosterate, tetrasodiumprophosphate and polysorbate 60.
The frosting had “natural flavor” but it didn’t say what kind. Woven mainly from palm oil and corn syrup, it was dry, sickly-sweet and tasted almost entirely of sugar.
As for the tiny, crunchy rainbow sprinkles that enchant millions – I had to brush twice after they stuck between my teeth.
The chocolate Dot at least included alkali-processed cocoa, a substance not entirely created in a lab. But its texture was as sticky and mealy as a cellophane-wrapped bodega product costing $7 less and requiring far less hassle.
I waited an hour on the sidewalk outside Butterfield on Madison Avenue and East 85th Street. The line was even longer at the location on Lexington and East 78th. I hoped against hope the Dots would deliver a guilty-pleasure kick like Dominique Ansel’s Cronuts first did in 2013. There were lines around the block for those, too! Those were at least worth the wait.
As we inched past a smelly garbage dumpster and a passerby yelled, “Are they giving away money?,” my fellow customers sounded wary of the cakes they’d yet to taste.
Twenty-something Celia Lo, visiting with her boyfriend from London, said, “I want to go home and say, ‘They’re great’ —I don’t want to tell them, ‘I waited all day and they sucked.’ ”
A young Manhattan woman who wouldn’t share her name said in a resigned tone, “I have a free will and free time and this is how I choose to spend my time?”
A friendly fellow named Timo, part of the Butterfield team, managed the line so as not to block the store’s freight entrance. (They also count heads so that nobody waits only to find they ran out.) Asked how much he liked the Dots, he revealed, “I haven’t had one myself.”
Maybe he knew something.
Two girls sharing their cups on a bench wore sour looks. “I like the buttercrunch,” one said of a quality I had somehow missed, “but it’s a lot of hype.”
Timo, quipped “Wait three weeks and they might not be as viral.”
Sorry, but life’s too short. I’ll take a $3 sprinkle-topped convenience-store cookie with a choice of chocolate or rainbow nonpareils — and no wait at all.
