Everyone’s Going Crazy for This Cake That Looks Like a Raindrop
You know how, as a kid, you used to try to catch raindrops on your tongue as they fell from the sky? Now there’s a food that seeks to help you recapture that sensation: the Raindrop Cake, which was created by New York chef Darren Wong and is taking the Internet by storm (only partly because it looks sort of like a giant silicone breast implant).
Wong, who is now selling the Raindrop Cake at Brooklyn’s trendy Smorgasburg open-air food markets and may expand to other venues, was inspired to create the gelatinous clear dessert blob by Japan’s traditional mizu shingen mochi, a food he had read about and was eager to try.
“It was … not available in the U.S.,” he said in an interview posted on the official Raindrop Cake website, “so I decided I would figure out how to make [it] so others who were interested in it like myself can try it.”
After a fair amount of trial and error, Wong came up with the current recipe, which combines “natural spring water” and “just enough agar to hold its shape,” he recently said on the Today show, adding that eating Raindrop Cake is a true “textural experience” as well as one that is “visually appealing.”
The Raindrop Cake is served topped with black sugar-cane syrup and with roasted soy flour on the side, which purportedly give it a nutty, molasses-like flavor.
“It’s a light, delicate and refreshing raindrop made for your mouth,” the Raindrop Cake website boasts. But, like the first of its namesake nouns, the Raindrop Cake is somewhat evanescent — it starts to lose its shape fairly quickly after it is served — and therefore not something you’d order to go. “It’s really a dessert you experience in the moment,” Wong said on Today.
Clearly.
Photo courtesy of @raindropcake