Boba Cakes Are Here, Are We Ready To Ride That Wave?
In Instagram’s heightened influence on how we eat within the past couple of years, the proliferation of wild concoctions and foods especially made “for the ‘Gram” have become the norm. Trends have come and gone while the pasta that’s stuck to the proverbial wall have become mainstays due to achieving that unique appeal of simply being an item that we’d crave and need regularly as opposed to a one-time photo-op.
The latest player in the Game of ‘Grams for foodies are boba cakes, a combo of words that I thought would only be possible being mentioned as separate entities in one sentence. But here we are in 2019, faced with the delicious aspect of soft, chewy, and mildly sweet tapioca balls occupying the space within a cake usually reserved for sweet creams and frosting of different sorts.
As you can see by the above clip from Hok Tea in Westminster, California, the boba cake concept is prime content for Instagram feeds, what with the jaw-dropping reveal of a mini Nutella cake being chockfull of boba balls. Hok Tea also serves an ube boba cake that’s covered by a layer of ube cream cheese. Yeah, that part. And while this very notion of boba balls inside moist cakes can be appalling to some, it’s more so a tempting fusion that warrants curious palates like mine to sink our teeth into. I mean, what could go wrong? Boba in cake — where do I sign up?
As for the inspiration behind the boba cakes, Hok Tea commented, “The idea of the boba cake originated in Asia and became very popular. We always want to create a unique product that seems to represent both Western and Eastern culture. From there we came up with an idea to merge both cake and boba together.”
