Earlier this summer, a New York bakery known as The Dot Cakes gained popularity for their sprinkled cakes. And as people went crazy for dotcakes, those online started to say how the cake reminded them of the Mexican pastry known as cortadillo.
Some users online shared how they felt about the comparison, with one user in a video saying that dotcakes were "gentrifying cortadillo."
Although the concept of cakes with frosting and sprinkles isn't new, this conversation brings up an interesting question: What does cultural appropriation in food look like?
Krishnendu Ray, a New York University professor, said that people from different parts of the world can end up making similar foods.
"Take the instance of the culture I come from: flatbreads such as chapatis or roti… You have a flour, you have salt, and you have water. In Zanzibar, the chapati has added fat. In Kuala Lumpur, it might become roti canai," he said.
Ray said that this would be an example of circulation instead of appropriation.
He also said that trying to answer whether dotcakes could be cultural appropriation depends on the intent by the makers of these cakes.
"That would need some kind of an investigative work to find out whether the people who claimed this kind of the dotcake boom were inspired by and intentionally hid their sources, so that is yet to be, in some ways, established," he said.
KUNR reached out to The Dot Cakes team for an interview, but they declined.
What can be understood from these conversations around food is there's always continuous influence between cultures, Ray said.
"Food has always influenced across long distances. We find Indian spices in Egypt in Egyptian mummies. So we know that, we have lots of evidence. But the intensity has gone up, of course, with social media and digitization, especially over the last generation. And so, yes, there can be all kinds of sources, and people often riff off each other's ideas. Like we do in music," he said.
Arturo Gonzalez owns La Deliciosa Bakery in Sparks. He described cortadillo this way:
"Well cortadillo is a bread more than anything, a cake bread, and it's one of the most delicious pastries. There's many different flavors; there's vanilla, we have strawberry, and actually we're making one that's lemon flavor, and one with strawberry and lemon," he said in Spanish.
González said he hadn't heard about dotcakes, but after hearing a brief explanation of what it is and why people are comparing it to cortadillo, he'd be open to trying it.
"It might taste good, it might not, and also it could be that it's popular because it's good. Typically a bread that is good and tasty will show up wherever," he said in Spanish.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio, and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
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