anya’s mango with sticky rice, dessert fusion style

This is a fusion version of that Thai favorite in mango season: sticky rice with mango. Going clockwise around the plate:  mango sorbet, mango, coconut-jasmine jelly, mango maccaron with pineapple jam. And that’s a cube of sticky rice with coconut sauce in that syringe-like tube sticking out of it like a junkie’s stolen fix. The tube was the only inedible thing besides that plate. And that purplish blob in the center is taro sorbet. The whole thing was lined up on a bed of crushed cookies and nuts.

As a fusion dessert it was whimsical if a bit puzzling. We had to ask what was in the tube. So we pulled it out of the rice (For some reason The Sword in the Stone flashed in my mind) and squirted the coconut sauce  all over the rice, as that is customary. The dessert tasted a lot better than it looked.  It was sweet, salty, crunchy, cold, gelatinous–though I would have preferred the taro ice cream with corn for texture. We split the maccaron and I was disappointed that the pineapple jam was from a jar. Now I’m curious to know if they outsourced the maccaron, the jelly, the cookies, and the sorbet. We were so completely distracted by the novelty of the presentation that we forgot to notice we only got four pieces of mango, all for the price of Baht 250. I could just spit. At the market you get an entire half of a mango, without the fussy fusion.