TRIED AND TASTED: DESSERTS AT ZUNI

Zuni is one of the posh restaurants you can find in Greenbelt 5. Well received by its Makati clientele for its wide selection of perfectly done meats and seafood, the restaurant has a relaxed yet elegant ambience. 

To get a 360 degree of the restaurant, just click on the pic to get linked to their website.

My friends and I found ourselves gravitating towards the restaurant after attending an exhibit opening in the nearby Ayala Museum. Since we were full, we skipped the entrees and went straight for the desserts.

The Zuni Obsession is a drool-worthy platter of moist chocolate cake with chocolate ganache served with assorted fresh fruits and vanilla ice cream on hippen mush. 

It's such a pretty dessert, you almost don't want to eat it. Almost. The cake was moist and not overly sweet and went well with the vanilla ice cream. It's a sophisticated version of brownie a la mode. What intrigued me was the term "hippen mush." It turns out, it's not mush but rather, masse as in hippenmasse, the baking term for a crusty wafer-like pastry shell that tastes like barquillos or an ice cream cone. Funny that they made the dessert so pretty but forgot to check the name on the menu. 

We also tried the Peach and Apple Crumble. Again, wonderfully plated.

 

The mini pie contained a mix of peach and apple and served with apple sauce, mini peach halves, mint leaves and a patina of powdered dark cocoa, which I believe was more for show than to tie in all the elements together. It's forgivable, though, since you could choose to skip the bitter cocoa since the tangy apple sauce was enough to balance the sweetness from all over.

Zuni Greenbelt

Address: Level 1, Greenbelt 5, Ayala Center, Greenbelt, Makati City

Telephone:  +63 9175349197 / 02 7570361

Website:  http://www.zuni.com.ph

 

FOUND: THE PEACH OF IMMORTALITY

These fruits look weird.

But don't be quick to judge. These are not seeds of alien conquerors from the red planet Mars. At first it looked like the local mabolo (Fuzzy apple) to me.  After extensive Googling, it turns out that these are Saturn peaches, which were first grown in China in the 19th Century where it is known as the the pan tao peach.

In Chinese Taoist mythology, it is the "peach of immortality" that grows in the mythical orchards of Mount Kunlun where the goddess Xi Wang Mu, the Queen mother of the West, resides. After 3,000 years, the peaches ripened and she invited eight lucky mortals to a banquet where the pan tao peach was served and the mortals were blessed with  prosperity, eternal bliss and immortality. They have since then been know as the Xian, Eight Immortals, who are supposed to be living in five islands in the Bohai sea in Northeastern China.

Photo courtesy of Dr. Meierhofer

Surprisingly, this relatively rare fruit has a lot of aliases: Doughnut peach, UFO peach, flat peach, paraguayo peach, saucer peach, belly-up peach, hat peach, or custard peach.

This fragrant fruit  has a hint of almond and can be eaten by simply breaking in half and sucking the meat off the skin and the pip. They are sweeter than the regular peach but the meat is whiter and firmer, so there's less juice dripping as you eat it.