Filipino desserts

Filipino dessert sits at a four-way junction. Native Malay roots provide the rice cakes — bibingka, puto, suman, sapin-sapin, kutsinta — made from glutinous-rice flour and steamed in banana leaf or moulded into brilliantly coloured layered cakes. Three hundred years of Spanish presence left a strong Iberian inheritance: leche flan, ensaymada, polvorón, turon. American occupation in the twentieth century then added an enthusiasm for ice cream, condensed milk, and the spectacular layered crowns of halo-halo.

The signature ingredient across most of it is ube, the deep purple yam that flavours and tints everything from ice cream to cake to the topping of halo-halo. Filipino sweetness is often emphatic — heavily sugared, condensed-milky, finished with a scoop of ice cream — and is unapologetic about it.

The country's dessert culture is also markedly seasonal in its festival sweets: bibingka and puto-bumbong appear at Christmas, suman in fiesta season, halo-halo at the height of summer.