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This post originally appeared at Travel + Leisure.
Dessert doesn’t get more traditional than American pie—unless you’ve ordered cherpumple, which stacks layers of apple, cherry, and pumpkin pies within a spice cake that’s sealed in cream cheese frosting.
An L.A. humorist invented it in 2009, and a year later, a Philadelphia bakery introduced the similar 1,880-calorie-per-slice Pumpple Cake.
These after-dinner sweets were no afterthought. Chefs increasingly push the boundaries of what qualifies as dessert, experimenting with savory, spicy ingredients and radical presentations. Other strange desserts draw on centuries-old, culturally specific recipes that can require days of preparation work.
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The kitchen staff at Istanbul’s five-star Ciragan Palace Hotel—an elaborate compound that the last sultans called home—needs 72-hour notice to prepare the $1,000 Sultan’s Golden Cake. The process includes the infusion of rare French Polynesian vanilla, a topping of caramelized black truffles, and a coating of 24-karat edible gold flakes.
RELATED: World's Strangest Chocolates
At the other end of the price scale, you’ll find ais kacang, sold in food courts across Malaysia and Singapore. Made from shaved ice mixed with red beans, lychee fruit, and green grass jelly, and topped with evaporated milk, this dessert requires an adventurous palate. David Hogan Jr., who manages the Malaysia Asia blog, is a fan: “To me, it’s awesome, but some of my foreign friends could not understand it at all,” he shares. “It’s the green jelly that would most probably scare you as it looks like green worms.”
Other strange desserts get their wow factor from chefs who take a mad-scientist approach—using liquid nitrogen, for instance—or who employ theatrical flair. Chicago-based chef Grant Achatz of the restaurant Alinea has earned a reputation for dishes that defy the ordinary. Imagine a server swirling spoonfuls of red lingonberry syrup and yellow butternut directly on your tabletop, followed by drops of sweet stout reduction, before smashing bowling-size chocolate balls like piñatas.
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“The idea of plating on an entire table surface was something we thought of before Alinea opened,” he says. “We wanted to go beyond the limitations of the plate in an effort to maximize the scale of the presentation.”
Here are more desserts that go beyond the limits of the familiar, with strange and often delectable results.
Nitrogen Ice Cream: Manila
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While NASA has long been flash-freezing meals for its astronauts, only a few daring restaurants have explored the new frontier of molecular gastronomy. One such pioneer, Zenses Neo-Shanghai Cuisine at Manila’s A. Venue Mall, serves a “Nitro” ice cream: fresh cream batter frozen in front of guests with fast-acting liquid nitrogen. The ice cream comes in unusual flavors like rose, lavender, and osmanthus as well as a simulated “bacon and eggs.” Check out our slideshow of the World’s Strangest Ice Cream for more eyebrow-raising flavors worldwide.
Source: Travel + Leisure
Dark Chocolate: Chicago
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Don’t be fooled by its modest name—ordering this dessert at the restaurant Alinea treats you to a full-on performance. A server swirls spoonfuls of red lingonberry syrup and yellow butternut directly on the tabletop followed by drops of sweet stout reduction and ultimately smashes bowling-size chocolate balls like piñatas (captured in this Alinea video clip). “Chef de Cuisine Matt Chasseur came up with the concept to involve the element of surprise and sound with the ball breaking on the table,” says chef and owner Grant Achatz. The restaurant is famous for such one-of-a-kind dishes, including the Winter Scene dessert that, according to Achatz, “uses birch bark and Douglas fir as a serving piece and replicates the aesthetics of a snowy winter in New Hampshire.” It contains peppermint snow, compressed persimmon, honey gelée, cranberry pudding, and anise hyssop.
Source: Travel + Leisure
Cherpumple: Los Angeles
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First came the turducken: a chicken stuffed inside a duck that is subsequently stuffed into a turkey and baked together to spruce up Thanksgiving dinner. Then, in 2009, it inspired L.A.-based humorist Charles Phoenix to create the cherpumple, which layers three classic American pies—apple, cherry, and pumpkin—using cream cheese frosting to seal each layer. The pies are then all baked inside a massive spice cake, making for an impressive-looking tower of baked goodness. A year later, Philadelphia’s Flying Monkey bakery made headlines for its own stuffed dessert: the Pumpple Cake, which layers apple and pumpkin pie, slathered in buttercream frosting, at 1,800 calories per slice.
Source: Travel + Leisure
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