Happy New Year everyone! For the final Chocoholic Cjap visit for 2010, we have Pong, located down a flight of stairs beneath a Japanese restaurant on St. Mark's Place.
Pastry Chef Pichet Ong blends together classic American desserts with unique Asian inspiration to bring delicious and interesting cookies, cupcakes and puddings. Pong made it to our wish list when they were featured in one of my dessert blogs as having one of the best black and white cookies, made with Japanese Pocky cookies. We stopped in, to find out they no longer make the black and white cookies. The desserts looked so good though, that we had to try something else.
There were a ton of perfectly frosted, interestingly flavored cupcakes. Vanilla caramel vietnamese coffee. Chocolate green tea fruit jam. Vanilla Yuzu lemon. Mocha maldon salt caramel. We actually didn't try the cupcakes today since we were on our way to dinner and wanted something small, but we'll definitely be coming back to try this. They also had puddings and ice cream with a wide toppings bars including chocolate pearls, walnut soil, roasted kumquat, and blueberry compote. I don't know what half of the words I just wrote actually are, but I'm sure they taste great over condensed milk, basil, Vietnamese coffee or green tea ice cream. Or apple mint mojito or blood orange sorbet. Weird, but interesting, and worth trying. There's also a wide assortment of dessert tapas combining all the weird ingredients you can add on to your ice cream.
We decided to try the chocolate coconut cookie and the Valrhona brownie. The cookie was big, definitely needed to be shared between two people, a tiny bit smaller than the City Bakery cookies. They were fairly thin, and were full of large, soft, freshly-baked chocolate chunks. The coconut taste was subtle, but gave it a special kick not found in a typical chocolate chip cookie.
The brownie, despite being made with our favorite type of chocolate (Valrhona), was just okay. It was dense and rich (Val is a dark, rich chocolate) and had a spicy kick aftertaste, but there were no chocolate chips inside and I just didn't care about the brownie one way or the other.
There are tables inside Spot where you can sit and get a dessert and tea and enjoy your novelty desserts, you can take it to go, or order from Seamless Web if you live in the East Village. I'll definitely be back here to try one of their cupcakes, and I'm definitely recommending this place.
Spot is located at 13 St. Mark's place, basement level. Spot Dessert Bar
