The Dotcake craze: How a Roslyn bakery went viral, then watched the trend spread

Scrolling Instagram and TikTok, Khadijah Cole saw the same dessert over and over.

Covered in colorful, bead-like sprinkles pressed into white frosting, the cup-sized cakes known as Dotcups from Long Island bakery The Dotcakes had become a viral sensation. Cole decided she needed to try one.

She arrived at the Roslyn bakery about 20 minutes after a Wednesday afternoon restock in late May and found the cakes had already sold out. She returned the next morning and finally got her chance.

Beaming, Cole, a student adviser at a college in Queens, posed for a photo outside the unassuming storefront. A plastic shopping bag holding four coveted Dotcups dangled from her right hand.

“You kind of get into the hype,” Cole said. “You want to be a part of the conversation.”

The moment is one co-owners Alex Posner and her mother, Sondra Posner, have watched play out repeatedly in recent weeks.

As videos of customers and influencers tapping the cakes’ sprinkle-covered surfaces spread across TikTok and Instagram, the mother-daughter duo has seen demand surge, lines form outside the Roslyn bakery and wholesale orders multiply. The sudden popularity has created opportunities for growth — while raising questions about similar desserts inspired by the trend, trademarks and whether the craze will last.

Experiences like the Posners’ are not accidental, said Jonah Berger, a Wharton School professor who has studied consumer behavior, brands and online sharing.

“It’s not random, it’s not luck and it’s not chance,” Berger said. “There’s a science behind why things catch on.”

The Dotcakes' products are highly visible on social media, making them easy to imitate and share, Berger said. The colorful desserts stand out in crowded feeds and encourage customers to post photos and videos of their experiences.

“Part of it is to try the cake, but part of it’s also to do this thing that everybody else is talking about,” he said.

But the company’s viral rise didn’t happen overnight.

The Dotcakes started operating as a ghost kitchen in 2019 before opening its Roslyn storefront in 2023, Alex Posner said. While the bakery built its brand around sprinkle-covered Dotcakes, it was the smaller Dotcups that ultimately went viral.

A sign the product was breaking through came in late April, when wholesale partner Butterfield Market in Manhattan requested roughly four times its normal order, Posner said.

Today, The Dotcakes produces about 1,200 units a week for Butterfield Market, another 800 a week for smaller wholesale accounts and roughly 800 Dotcups a day for its Roslyn storefront, Posner said.

“People always want things that are hard to get,” said Stacey Finkelstein, a Stony Brook University marketing professor. “We infer that things are more valuable when we see people waiting in lines.”

The challenge of a viral hit

As the desserts spread across social media, similar products have started appearing elsewhere.

Pino’s in Dix Hills has advertised “Dot Cakes” on Instagram. Other businesses have introduced their own versions under similar names or different branding. Front Street Bakery in Rockville Centre is making a sprinkle-covered variation with three types of nonpareils, and Uncle Joey’s Rainbow Explosion has introduced a rainbow-cookie version, Newsday has reported.

In Babylon, Torta Fina Bakeshoppe & Patisserie introduced its own version of the cake cups in late May.

When his high school- and college-age employees brought him the idea, Torta Fina owner Joseph Campbell thought it was just a trend started by social media users making cakes at home.

“I wasn’t really understanding the dot thing, but it does give you a little bit of a crunch,” Campbell said.

The first day Torta Fina made the cakes, Campbell estimated the bakery sold 120 of them.

“I think it will wean off a little,” Campbell said. “Right now it’s popular.”

Campbell compared the phenomenon to the cronut craze, when bakeries across the country rushed to create their own versions of a viral product.

“I think everyone kind of just, in the bakery business, looks for inspiration in what everyone else is doing and jumps on trends,” he said.

At $8.50 a cup, Torta Fina’s version is bigger than the original and has an additional layer of frosting.

The emergence of similar products has put The Dotcakes in an unusual position: benefiting from viral attention while trying to protect a brand it said is trademarked.

The Posners said they are exploring partnerships, licensing opportunities and educational content that would allow others to participate in the trend while distinguishing The Dotcakes'  protected branding from decorating techniques that others can emulate.

“If you’re telling me that you sell a Dotcake, you don’t, because we do,” Alex Posner said. “You don’t have our recipes, you don’t have our sprinkle distributors, you don’t have our process, you don’t have our packaging.”

Federal trademark records show The Dotcakes owns registrations for “DOTCAKES” and “DOTCUPS.”

That protection applies to the brand name, not necessarily the product itself, Long Island patent attorney Dan Weglarz said.

“It doesn’t protect the underlying product. That’s what a patent would do,” Weglarz said.

In practical terms, competitors can sell similar sprinkle-covered cake cups under different names. Trademark law generally protects the branding and identity associated with a product, Weglarz said.

For businesses worried about trademark infringement, the challenge is deciding how aggressively to police trademarks while benefiting from the attention the trend is generating, Weglarz said.

“The value of the trademark is increasing because the product is becoming more widely known,” Weglarz said.

That dynamic recently played out on Instagram when Town Bagel in Plainview promoted a Dotcake-inspired cookie. The Dotcakes responded publicly, praising the bakery’s creativity while suggesting a conversation about carrying the original product.

But pursuing enforcement against every similar product may not make business sense.

“It may almost be worth going viral, even if you’re weakening your trademarks, if it’s going to bring you a ton of business and that’s the thing that’s going to keep you in business and get you well-known,” Weglarz said.

Can The Dotcakes make the moment last?

Trademark questions are only part of the challenge.

The larger question is whether The Dotcakes can turn a viral moment into lasting demand.

Whether a viral business sees short- or long-term success depends partly on how much customers actually like the product — and whether they can easily get it once the initial excitement fades, Berger said.

“The features that make something more word-of-mouth-worthy or more likely to catch on aren’t necessarily always the things that make them stick around,” Berger said.

Interest in trying a product does not guarantee customers will return.

“Once I’ve had it, maybe that social currency isn’t as cool as it once was,” Berger said.

Over the last two weeks of May, The Dotcakes sold 5,000 units through its Roslyn storefront and another 2,500 through Butterfield Market, Alex Posner said.

That growth is already forcing the company to think about what’s next.

“As of right now, we’re all based out of Roslyn, we have a full kitchen in the back,” Posner said.

“Obviously,” she added, “we’re going to need to look into expanding that a little bit.”