Is the Cake Pop the New Cupcake?

Food fads are changing, and, for the sake of your sweet tooth, I suggest you keep up. For over a year, I’ve been boggled by the cupcake’s ability to reinvent itself. Stuffed, styled, and miniaturized, this children’s birthday party classic even scored its own television competition series.

I instantly turned my focus to the next step: what would ultimately give the cupcake the boot? When I first discovered brownie pops last summer, I thought that I had nailed it, but I had erred by overlooking the other birthday-party staple—cake. In part, I see this as the reason that the brownie pop tanked – that, and the fact that Starbucks didn’t endorse it.

The trouble with cake is that when you try to make it portable, the snack just gets complicated and irritating; however, once you put it on a stick, things get interesting.

Small bakeries (and home cooks with Internet access) are selling this new stick snack across the country, but nothing shocked this new wave like Starbucks did when they decided to dip their toe in the cake-pop-pool. For $1.50 you get about one compact bite of cake. The seemingly skewed price/cake ratio must be necessary in order to cover the costs of injecting as much butter as each morsel will allow.  A cross-sectional view of the pop shows the cake’s consistency, resembling that of raw dough, a recipe call with which I can’t argue.

Cake pops come in various flavors. Starbucks provides three: tiramisu, rocky road, and birthday cake. I’ve rarely seen a Starbucks have all three in stock, so I sampled the tiramisu and rocky road. Aside from the slight embellishments rested atop the frosting, the flavors were indistinguishable from one another. Regardless, the pops were pretty delicious and almost too rich to finish.  Almost.