Cool off with Raindrop Cake

It tastes wet. Like nothing at all. Like what it is. Water. A piece of water. Whimsically shaped jellied spring water. But water still.

Pure. Crisp. Clean. Refreshing.

Accompaniments add to the taste and texture. Toasted soy flour lends a mild nuttiness that, when mixed with the melty “cake,” tastes a little like peanut butter. Black sugar and matcha green tea syrups provide a gentle sweetness.

The first time I had a Raindrop Cake, I chose black sugar syrup. But before my first bite, I couldn’t resist the urge to poke the thing. It was wiggly, jiggly, but not as thick nor as firm as gummy candy or Jell-O or gelatin – all things to which it’s been compared.

I poked it again.

“Is it good?” someone asked.

“Is it worth it?” asked someone else.

I was standing in one of the few shady spots at Smorgasburg LA, a weekly food fair held at the 5-acre Alameda Produce Market in downtown Los Angeles. It was mid-July. It was hot.

I had flown down for a three-day beach weekend. Raindrop Cake was the reason I made a beeline for Smorgasburg.

I had come across photos online of the see-through sweet, which debuted in spring at Smorgasburg in New York and arrived at the LA event in mid-June. By then, it was already an internet sensation. Raindrop Cake had gone viral.

The wow factor comes from its looks. Raindrop Cake is glassy-looking and shaped like an oversized drop of dew. It’s a conversation starter, something that piques curiosity, maybe even a bit of awe, uncertainty, incredulity.

“People are nervous about it,” said Raindrop Cake creator Darren Wong. “Sometimes, they’re weirded out. I think the American palate finds jelly things kind of weird.”

The texture is supposed to be part of the appeal.

“I’m not just selling a food item,” Wong said. “I’m selling a new, fun food experience. Raindrop Cake is not just something you eat. It’s about everything: the presentation, the visual experience, the toppings.”

‘Playful food’

The Raindrop Cake website – www.raindropcake.com – describes the confection as “a light, delicate and refreshing raindrop made for your mouth.”

Both the website and the cake were developed earlier this year by Wong, a 36-year-old digital brand strategist in New York who has since quit advertising to focus on his new food business. He modeled his dessert after mizu shingen mochi, which – he said – roughly translates to “Japanese water cakes.”

Wong, originally from LA, has never been to Japan. He came across the whimsical water cakes online in 2015 and was intrigued. But he figured he would find them soon enough on the trendy New York food scene and “kind of forgot about them for a year.”

In early 2016, when Wong randomly remembered the mochi and looked around online, he couldn’t find it in New York. “So I was like maybe I can try to make this myself, and I started researching how to jelly water.”

Wong tried a variety of different kinds of water and gelatin. For two or three months, he experimented at home – making a batch at night, then seeing in the morning how it had turned out. He also experimented with making different toppings.

“I don’t have a chef’s background,” Wong said. “But, I thought, hey, maybe there’s something here. This was a fun food item, and I thought other people would see the funness of it and want to try it for themselves.”

Wong hired a photographer and started brainstorming names.

“It looks like a water droplet,” he said. “That’s sort of what drew me into it. It reminds me of a scene from ‘A Bug’s Life,’ ” the 1998 Disney/Pixar film in which animated insects drink dew drops from leaves. “It’s a playful food.”

‘The next Cronut’

As soon as the website and Facebook page went live reporters started calling.

“The media attention I got was surprising and appreciated and awesome,” Wong said. “Before anyone even tried the cake, I had press and magazines and blogs calling this ‘the next Cronut.’ If I had done this in another city, would I have gotten as much press? I don’t know. New York is always looking for the next Cronut.”

As far as ingredients go, Raindrop Cake is the anti-Cronut.

Raindrop Cake is light and simple, the opposite of a heavy, buttery, over-the-top doughnut-croissant hybrid developed by Dominique Ansel in 2013. In fact, Raindrop Cake is quite possibly the world’s lowest-calorie dessert. Spring water – “not tap water,” Wong said – is the main ingredient. Of all of the waters he tried, Wong said, “To me, it has the best mouth feel. It has the best taste.”

‘Down to decimal places’

That hot day in LA, I could’ve paid – what? $2 or $3? – for a bottle of water. Instead, fascinated by the photos, I sought out my first Raindrop Cake.

It was stunning in its simplicity, elegant but also fantastical. I could honestly say I’d never tried anything quite like the charming and chubby bead of jellied water, presented chilled in a small pine serving boat. It came with a bamboo spoon.

I ate it quickly. Raindrop Cake doesn’t keep its shape for long. It can’t be left out, especially not in the hot sun. Within a half hour, it would likely become a puddle.

“It’s designed to be fragile,” Wong said. “I use as little agar, the binding agent, as possible, so that it does sort of dissolve in your mouth.”

Agar, a gelling agent derived from seaweed, helps the dessert keep its slurpy consistency and hold its hemispherical shape – both qualities that have led some customers to ungraciously compare Raindrop Cake to breast implants. The comparison doesn’t bother Wong, who said it shows people are engaging with and talking about his product. “That’s what’s motivating to me.”

Today, Raindrop Cake is trademarked. And Wong’s recipe is precise. He weighs ingredients. “I have it down to decimal places.”

‘You’ve been had!’

The dessert is basically flavorless. If you want it to taste like anything, condiments – such as the roasted soybean flour, called kinako, and black sugar syrup, called kuromitsu – are required.

With toppings, Raindrop Cake is satisfying – filling, but without any sense of heaviness.

Your wallet might feel light, too. I paid $8 to eat water. It seemed expensive.

“I get that a lot,” Wong said, noting much of the cost is associated with the toppings. “Matcha’s expensive, and we tend to go for the ceremonial grade, which is more.”

Plus, he said, toasted soybean flour and Japanese black sugar can be pricey and hard to find. “If you take all those things together, it’s a lot more expensive than agar and water.”

I had been so hot and so thirsty at Smorgasburg LA that I could’ve eaten two or three of them. It was kind of marvelous. To eat rather than drink water. But not at that price.

“You’ve been had!” a friend who owns a restaurant wrote on my Facebook page when I got back to Spokane.

Would I pay $8 for one again? Maybe. That’s because Wong has developed other flavors: lavender-blueberry, s’mores, lemon meringue.

He’s also experimenting with moving away from clear jelly “to something that’s maybe colored.”

DIY

Meantime, would I pay $8 for a silicone mold so I could make my own at home? Done.

And, rather than travel to LA or NYC or Japan if you want to try one, that’s what you might want to do, too. In fact, you don’t even have to buy a mold. After a little experimenting, I found small bowls work, too.

If you have a Raindrop Cake-making fail, which I did – I was a too eager the first couple of times and unmolded too soon – you won’t feel like you wasted lots time or ingredients. And, you can always eat your mistakes, even if they’re not perfectly formed.

I bought 4 ounces of agar online for $13.50. That pouch will last a while; you only need 1/8 teaspoon of the stuff for the 2/3 cup of water required for a cake.

There are other uses for it. Common in Asian cooking, agar can be found in everything from noodles to vegan marshmallows.

“I’ve been eating these kinds of desserts since I was a kid,” said Wong, who’s of Chinese descent. “All Asian cultures use agar and have created versions of jelly desserts.”

I found kinako online for $5.50 for 5 ounces. You only need a teaspoon or two for serving. It, too, will last a while. I used organic turbinado sugar that I had on hand to make the dark sugar syrup, which I saw online for nearly $15 for about 5 ounces. (Though you can find it for much less at your local grocery.)

The process was rather simple. The hardest part was having the patience to wait for the water to gel.

Some recipes called for powdered sugar or vanilla sugar. I tried powdered sugar. It didn’t seem to make much difference. But it got me thinking about other variations. I experimented, adding freshly squeezed lemon juice for a brighter dessert or palate cleanser.

I considered a vanilla-honey sauce scented with orange peel and cinnamon. Raspberry coulis and toasted soy bean, peanut or almond flour might make for a sort of peanut butter-and-jelly-esque dessert.

Come to think of it, any coulis might be a fun pairing: strawberry, mango, guava, apricot, peach. How about serving them with infused simple syrups: basil, lavender, rosemary, thyme, cardamom, black and pink or jalapeno pepper, ginger? Or, scented sugars? Perhaps pulverized graham crackers, like Wong does with his s’mores version?

I’m looking forward to coming up with more combinations – maybe even seeing if I can add rum or vodka or sake and still get the drop to hold its shape for a raindrop – instead of Jell-O – shot.

Meantime, Wong’s developing on a DIY kit for home cooks. “People have heard of it and want to try it, but I can’t start a booth everywhere,” he said. “What I can do is make a DIY kit so people can make it at home themselves.”

Someday, Wong said he’d love to travel to Japan to sample the dessert that inspired him. “I’m really curious,” he said. “I’ve been told by people who come from Japan, they say it’s very different from mine.”

Raindrop Cake

Adapted from various websites

2/3 cup water (I used filtered water)

1/8 teaspoon agar powder

Add water and agar to a small sauce pan, a little at a time, stirring constantly to dissolve the powder and eliminate any lumps. Bring water to boil, then turn down heat to simmer for about 2 minutes, continuing to stir. Remove from heat and let cool. Pour mixture into molds, popping any bubbles that might appear. Transfer the molds to refrigerator and allow to set for a couple of hours or overnight. Carefully unmold cakes and serve immediately with desired toppings.

Yield: 1 cake

Dark Sugar Syrup

1 cup water

1 cup turbinado sugar

In a small saucepan, bring water and sugar to a boil, turn down heat and let simmer for about 1 minute. Stir to make sure mixture is well combined. Let cool.

Matcha Syrup

1 cup water

1 cup sugar

1 tablespoon matcha powder

In a small saucepan, bring all ingredients to a boil, turn down heat and let simmer for about 1 minute. Stir to make sure mixture is well combined. Let cool.