Cupcakes Are So Five Years Ago

My friend Lauren Martin left a full-time design job last year to start Sweet Lauren Cakes out of her Hayes Valley apartment. She does a lot of layered classics, but her specialty is a red velvet cakepop. Imagine a crumb as moist as a muffin top and a white-chocolate shell that turns creamy after you bite into it. They’re starting to give the whole cupcake craze a run for its money. I’ve seen them at parties and wedding receptions because—well, besides the fact that they’re beautiful and fudgy—you can hold a cocktail in one hand and have your cake in the other without skipping a beat. 

It’s a one-woman show, but another friend and I invited ourselves over to see exactly how Lauren does it. First, we baked several cakes in round pans, just as you would for a layered confection. After a cake cooled, it went into the food processor to get all broken up before we mixed in cream cheese frosting with the crumbs. Once we had a playdough-like mixture, we shaped the pops and let them chill in the fridge. We dipped pop sticks in melted white chocolate and inserted them into the cake. After a few minutes, we were ready to give the single-serving cakes an even coating of white chocolate. To decorate, Lauren likes to drizzle colored chocolate and sometimes garnish the shell with coconut flakes or whatever else she has in her amazing stock of sprinkles, nonpareils, and confetti.

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