This LA Cafe's Taking the Purple Dessert Craze to the Next Level

Ube -- the purple yam that’s been cropping up in everything from purple-kissed soft serve to $100 donuts -- has become the centerpiece at LA’s Cafe 86, a coffee and tea house that specializes in ube desserts.

“It’s a very mellow-flavored root vegetable,” explains chef and owner Ginger Dimapasok. “It’s such a unique flavor that people don’t normally have here in the United States.”

For Dimapasok, it made perfect sense to pair ube with an array of desserts, because the purple vegetable has such an adaptable flavor. With tropical notes of coconut and vanilla, ube has become the cafe’s signature ingredient, where it lives in over 30 different desserts.

Try the popular ube pop-tart, which is made with homemade pastry crust and pumped with ube, cream cheese, and coconut jam filling, then finished with a sweet ube glaze. If that's not your speed, test out the best-selling Ube Monster Truffle: an ube cake with white chocolate and crushed Oreos. The cafe also offer ube bundt cakes -- made with grated ube and dunked in ube glaze -- as well as flan-topped cupcakes and an Ube Monster Shake (ube ice cream blended with milk and crushed Oreos).

Check out the video above to see why everything’s coming up purple at this cafe.

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