Raindrop Cake: a water-and-agar dessert sells out at Smorgasburg for $8

The Raindrop Cake is exactly what it sounds like: a dessert that looks like a large, clear drop of water. It is a New York version of mizu shingen mochi, which Kinseiken Seika Company in Japan introduced about two years earlier and which went viral online in 2014. The cake is made from water — Wong says only spring water and agar powder — and comes with kinako, heavily roasted soybean powder, and kuromitsu, brown-sugar syrup, on the side.

Darren Wong, an advertising professional, saw the Japanese original go viral and wondered why nobody was making it in the United States. Recreating it took months: he experimented to find the correct ratio of agar to water so the jelly would hold its shape yet taste like water, and he had to solve transport for a dessert so fragile that it collapses into a puddle after roughly thirty minutes at room temperature.

The Raindrop Cake debuted at Smorgasburg's opening weekend in Brooklyn in early April 2016, served in little wooden boats at $8 each. The first batches sold out, and the stand became one of the market's most talked-about vendors of the season. Wong's team prepared the cakes ahead of time, boxed each one individually, and capped the day's output at about 600 because the portions are so delicate to store and carry.

What made the dessert a story was less its taste than its spectacle: Time Out described a crystalline creation already taking over New York foodie Instagram feeds, and reviewers stressed that it is close to zero calories and tastes like water. Buyers who missed out made return trips — one writer was told 'sold out' on a first visit and queued before lunch the following week to finally buy one.