About
Topkek is a brand of small Turkish cupcakes produced by the ETi Company. The snack became popular with regulars of the imageboard 4chan’s [s4s] board due to the use of “kek” in its name.
Origin
In Turkish, kek means cake, and Topkek, a brand of cupcakes, was first produced in 1990 by ETi, a Turkish confectionery company.[1] In 2011, the television show Workaholics aired an episode in which the character Adam Demamp wears a hat embroidered with Top Gun, and as this phrase spread in use, one of the mutations incorporated the phrase kek, creating “Topkek.” In May of 2013, an /s4s/ board user under the name “prime minister face” created a thread featuring the cake, which received over 6,000 replies before it was archived.[2] In 2014, the meme aggregator site Top Kek was created.[4]
Spread
An Encyclopedia Dramatica entry on Topkek was created on May 18th, 2013, around the same time of the original thread on /s4s/. An Urban Dictionary definition for “topkek” was created in September of 2013.[3] Sometime in 2013, a Flash video was created which heavily features the cake; a censored version of this Flash was uploaded to YouTube where it has been viewed 90,000 times. In 2014, an edited clip of a Based Tyrone video in which he says “top kek” was uploaded to YouTube, were it has been viewed over 365,000 times. In addition, the subreddit /r/topkek was created in July of 2013.[5]