Chinese desserts

Chinese dessert culture is in some ways less a single tradition than a loose federation: the deep-fried sesame balls of Cantonese yum cha, the slippery tangyuan of Shanghainese winter festivals, the steamed nian-gao of the Lunar New Year, the lyrical jelly desserts of Hong Kong cha chaan tengs. Across most of it, sugar is used with restraint and dairy almost not at all — a kitchen that found its sweetness in red beans, lotus seeds, black sesame, mung beans, palm sugar, and an enormous range of glutinous-rice and starch-based textures.

Many of the most iconic sweets are tied to specific festivals: tangyuan and nian-gao for the Lunar New Year, mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival, zongzi for the Dragon Boat Festival. The textures often catch outsiders by surprise — Chinese desserts prize the q bounce of glutinous rice, the slippery suspension of starch jellies, the dry-crumble of pastries shortened with lard.

The modern dessert café (especially in Hong Kong, Taipei, Guangzhou) has also produced a great wave of newer sweets — egg waffles, mango pomelo sago, taro-ball desserts — that now travel as widely as the older festival sweets.