Mr. Arnold chooses a creamy, sweet cocktail only if his dessert has very little sugar in it, and says that straight spirits often work well with sweet desserts.
For dessert, the Philippine-inspired, brown-sugar fried Banana Lumpia is a perfect bite into a hard wrap cover to unleash the mushy and very sweet inside.
He has a well-honed sense of presentation and play--a popular dessert is a "planet" with a raspberry core, grapefruit-cream surface, and hard-sugar atmosphere (his blueberry satellites didn't pan out).