Care for some pepper in your tea?

Pie reviewed the desserts at Ping Pong Dim Sum a few weeks ago, but I thought the drinks were good enough to deserve their own post.

Mr. X-sXe got the pear and kumquat tea (pear purée, fresh kumquats and jasmine iced tea). Mine was the raspberry and black pepper bubble tea (raspberry purée, jasmine iced tea and chewy tapioca “pearls”). Of course, you need a ridiculously giant straw so you can suck up the pearls. While both drinks were super light and refreshing, I recommend trying the raspberry one. The black pepper in it actually worked really well. The pepper floats on the top, so you can control how much you want per sip. Sounds like an odd combination, but pepper and tea isn’t unheard of. (Chai from scratch can be brewed with many spices, including black peppercorns.)

Read pie’s review of their desserts here: http://bit.ly/7IYvUB

dessert review: ping pong dim sum

To celebrate Cake’s birthday, Cake and I decided to eat some dim sum. (Of course, we tend to use anything as an excuse to eat dim sum.) This restaurant had the added advantage of having neither cake nor pie on the menu, so it served as fairly neutral territory.

After a really delicious meal, we then ordered two desserts: a chocolate-filled mantou (pictured above) and pineapple-mango spring rolls, pictured below:

The pineapple mango spring rolls made ordering dessert worthwhile (although Mr. Cake swears that the dipping sauce was caramel, not butterscotch.) The wrapper gave it a crispy and slightly salty package, with chunks of real pineapple and mango bursting in sweetness inside. All in all, lots of textures all kind of mingling in a really delightful way.

And the chocolate mantou bomb? Well, the chocolate was great but the mantou itself was not. I might be slightly prejudiced because of my pre-existing hate/hate relationship with mantou, which is tasteless, formless, and cursed with a remarkable ability to turn into a rocklike consistency in one’s stomach. Imagine steaming and heating a loaf of Wonder Bread and then trying to pass it off as breakfast food, and you’ve got mantou. Injecting it with an abudance of a rich, rich chocolate sauce didn’t make it any better.

Still, Cake and I will be going back, especially to try one of the additional mango desserts that was off the menu.