An Early Birthday Dessert and Dinner: Dessert Club Chikalicious and Minca (Part 1)

[Note: I’m splitting one night of fooding into two parts. You’ll find out where it is on the next post or if you’ve already checked out my Flickr photostream a while ago, you know it regardless.]

Last Monday I’ve planned to celebrate Helen’s birthday early. It’s warm enough and hell, it’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone besides my co-workers and family. I don’t have issues with either parties but it’s nice to see friends whom you love, no? Also the fact that I’ve planned to have brunch with Robyn the weekend of Helen’s actual birthday, so I’d rather commemorate her 24 years of existence on this planet early, rather than late, with the things she loves: desserts, ramen, and booze.

Dessert Club Chikalicious & Its Baked Goods

We kicked off our fooding with Dessert Club Chikalicious after being inspired and longing to try their desserts when I’ve read Ed Levine’s post. We thought that it’s too early to have dinner and it’s the closest to the subway stop, we went there first.

Triple Chocolate Cupcake & Innards

What I love about this cupcake was the fact it wasn’t the size of a baby’s head, intensely chocolate-y without being outrageously sweet, and the delicate, moist crumb. This is probably one of my favorite cupcakes. Helen was savoring every morsel as she just ate her half with bird-sized nibbles.

Adult Chocolate Pudding

We then moved on to the adult chocolate pudding. Man, I wish I could make chocolate pudding this luscious and silky. It’s like eating a creamy, not-so-sweet chocolate cloud. The chocolate streusel crumbs added a nice crunchy texture. I would eat a gallon of this.

Strawberry cheesecake

When we finally start noshing on the strawberry cheesecake, I was amazed how light it is. The crumbled graham cracker crust on top with the sweet strawberries, lightly sweetened, whipped cream (that’s the small, white oval next to the berries) and the creamy yet light cheesecake made it quite divine.

Minca’s menu

After finishing our desserts, we waddled our semi-stuffed selves over to Minca for the sake of Helen’s love of ramen.

Minca Ramen

Helen’s plan was to get their namesake bowl, the Minca ramen. The large bowl (probably has the size of a baby watermelon) filled with slurp-able ramen, salty, silky, collagen-rich pork broth, shredded black mushrooms, half a sheet of dried seaweed, half of a hard boiled egg and two moderately sized chunks of lipid rich pork (say 1/4 of the chunk is fat, while the rest is soft, succulent meat).

Toroniku Ramen

I ordered the toroniku ramen since it sounded decadently porky when I read it on the menu. And it was quite over the top when my bowl arrived. What made it more extravagant, if you will, were the facts that the broth is much more richer and not as salty as the Minca, there were a few more chunks of pork that’s more fattier (approximately 50:50 fat to melt in your mouth, sweet meat), and topped with chopped leaves of raw cabbage to balance out all of the delicious fattiness one is about to ingest from this bowl.

Gelatinous pork chunks

We’ve struggled to finish our bowls of ramen, sort of regretting the desserts we ate earlier. Feeling a bit disgusting and our bellies full of food, Helen and I decided to walk all the way from the East Village down to Chinatown to burn a few calories and unintentionally to our final destination of the evening to…[that’s part 2]

Addresses:
Dessert Club Chikalicious
204 E 10th Street
New York, NY 10003 (map)

Minca
536 E 5th Street
New York, NY 10009 (map)