Chik-a-licious is delicious

My favorite dessert place in New York is Chikalicious, which is a cute little hip Japanese dessert bar in the East Village.  Whenever a friend or relative is visiting and we find ourselves down there, we head over after dinner to try some fabulous unique creation.  They offer a three course tasting menu for $12 - you get an amuse bouche, a main course, and some petit fours.  The store is run by a very cute little Japanese woman named Chika, who invents all the desserts, and her husband Don, who deals with the front of the house.

My cousin and his girlfriend were in town tonight.  Once she revealed her passion for ice cream and desserts, I couldn't resist taking them to my favorite spot.

Since this is an ice cream blog, I'm going to focus on their amazingly flavorful ice creams. Tonight we had a pear sorbet with our amuse bouche.  It was like biting into the freshest most delicious frozen pear you've ever tasted.  With our main dishes, we had an egg nog ice cream with the sweet potato brulee, a roasted banana ice cream with the banana trifle, and pink peppercorn ice cream with the famous chocolate tart.

The pink peppercorn is by far my favorite.  It has a slightly spicy, slightly sweet quality.  They go very well with citrus and I find them to be quite floral.  Since discovering pink peppercorns at an old restaurant I worked at, I have loved them. Upon doing more research, I learned that pink peppercorns are actually a type of dried berry from the Baies rose plant.  Their flavor is incredibly unique.  I made my own pink peppercorn ice cream a year or so ago after being inspired by Chika.  It's a flavor I would definitely like to re-visit soon.

The roasted banana ice cream had a deep banana flavor, but you could taste the warmth and heartiness to the fact that the bananas were roasted. It was a heavier flavor than your typical banana ice cream.

The egg nog ice cream was the one disappointment.  I couldn't quite get a strong egg nog flavor. Granted, my experience with egg nog is the store bought pre-made stuff.  But there wasn't enough nutmeg or spice or something.  It was incredibly creamy, but not as strong in flavor as 

I prefer my egg nog.

The exciting thing about chika's ice cream (besides the fact that they are incredible) is that she uses a little machine called a Pacojet.  This is something I heard about for the first time     

earlier this year.  It almost looks like a coffee maker of sorts and what it does is basically purees and freezes anything.  You add fresh fruit and a custard, for instance, and in a matter of minutes the machine chops it up, freezes, and whips it.  And then you have the creamiest. intensely flavored ice cream imaginable.  Or you can add parsley, water, and sugar and you have parsley sorbet.  

It certainly opens up the lines for creative and bizarre ice cream flavors - both sweet and savory.  And as much as I'd like to get my hands on one of these expensive machines, I almost feel like it's cheating.  It takes away the exciting process of figuring out how to get the flavor into the ice cream.  It does a lot of the work for you.  

However, in a business sense, it does make things a lot easier and faster.  I think I want to try one out for myself before I make a full judgement.  And anything that allows you to make bizarre, unique ice cream flavors certainly piques my interest.