Thai desserts

Traditional Thai dessert is dominated by two ingredients: coconut milk and palm sugar. Add to those a handful of supporting players — pandan, jasmine, sticky rice, mung-bean flour, egg yolk (an Iberian import via Portuguese trade in the 17th century) — and you have nearly the whole pantry. The royal-court tradition added intricate vegetable-carved sweets and the strikingly Portuguese-descended thong yip, thong yot and foi thong, all built around egg-yolk threads in sugar syrup.

Most Thai sweets are designed to be eaten in small quantities at the close of a meal or alongside very strong coffee. Heat and humidity have shaped the canon too: many of the classics are cool and slippery (khanom chan, tub-tim-krob), or are designed to revive on a hot afternoon (the shaved-ice desserts of street stalls).

The colour palette is loud and deliberate: the green of pandan, the deep purple of butterfly-pea flower, the bright pink of pomegranate-coated water- chestnut, the burnt amber of palm-sugar caramel.