For any dessert lovers who’d much rather roam around a museum munching and taking selfies, here’s a place for you.
On February 10, the 12,000-square foot Dessert Museum opened its doors in Manila with eight rooms tailored for different desserts—Cotton candy, gummy bear, marshmallow, bubble gum, donuts, candy cane, ice cream, cake pops—where you can jump, play, swing through and slide.
Perhaps the only museum tour that begins with visitors entering through a donut hole and down a pink slide, naturally every part of the Instagrammable space screams sugar overload. There are ‘Naughty’ and ‘Nice’ doors leading to different Candy Cane Groves, cotton candy trees from which you can actually pick and eat the treats, a marshmallow door, licorice rainbow, gummy trampolines, and a boutique to buy confetti cakes and other sweet treats.
Co-founders Tasha Reyes, Katrina Lacap, Joseph Moore came up with the idea five months ago hoping to express their love of travel and food. In addition to building and designing the museum, the close friends-slash-business partners wanted to create an experience that’s sharable on social media.
Take the Cotton Candy Forest as an example. According to Reyes, you enter the forest through a canopy of cotton candy trees, where you’ll see cut jar lights laid across the field. Those lights will guide you through the tree tunnel to a field of ultra-huggable cotton candy clouds. And there, Instagrammers can freely pose inside the cotton candy bowl or hug the clouds that reaches up to the ceiling. As a final touch, the fairy-dusted cotton candies on the trees (That’s cotton candy sprinkled with skimmed milk powder) can literally be picked for munching immediately.
If you’re like me, who prefers to seriously geek out about desserts over taking selfies, this probably isn’t the place for you. But for those who likes to learn a thing or two while munching, there’s “a lot of unique material” at The Dessert Museum, claimed Reyes. You can find out why there’s a hole in the donut; or delve into the history of different desserts, such as how Dentist William Morrison and candy maker John C. Wharton created a cotton candy using “floss sugar”—a type of sugar that’s melted and spun into a cloud-like treat with incredibly thin and long sugar threads—and called it “Fairy Floss.”
So far, the museum has attracted approximately 7,000 visitors on the first week and expected to welcome 40,000 more attendants in the next two months. Moving forward, Reyes wants to add more of a distinctive flavor to the museum, by incorporating local desserts and ingredients such as Ice Scramble and Ube to the mix.
Tickets are sold online for $13.4 (php 699) or $15.3 (php 799) for walk-ins, which cover two hours of roaming time around this sugar-loaded wonderland, plus six desserts such as hand-made artisanal chocolates, giant marshmallows, macarons, mini donuts and cake pops.
The Dessert Museum is located at S Maison at the Mall of Asia Complex in Manila.
