Sweet Temptations

The simplest Chinese dessert consists of a plate of fruits ranging from apples, water-melons, honey dews to papayas. While Chinese may not be well known for their large repertoire of desserts, Chinese desserts can be very delicate and delicious.

Chinese meals don't feature desserts, but there is no denying it is a pleasant custom and most Chinese restaurants humour their patrons by providing something to end the meal on a sweet note such as Toffee Apples, Almond Bean Curd or that incredibly Fried Ice Cream.

Most often though, sweets are eaten as between-meal snacks. Chinese sweet-meats are turned out in factories and are quite cheap and easy to purchase. Don't expect the labels to enlighten you about the contents. 'Peanut Cake' for instance, is flat, crisp and rather similar to Middle Eastern halva.



In addition, there are brittle, toffee-like bars of sesame seeds and sugar; deep fried cookies made of thin, crisp batter; flaky pastry or soft, freshly steamed yeast buns with fillings of sweet bean paste or lotus nut paste. Moon cakes, which sell by the thousand during the period leading up to the Moon Festival, are made from pastry pressed into a patterned wooden mould, filled with a solid core of chopped preserved fruits and nuts then richly glazed and baked. Those most prized have, in the centre, the yolk of a salted duck egg. However, not all people like the taste of it.

There is also a variety of dried fruit, prettily wrapped in paper and labelled either 'Preserved Plum', 'Preserved Prune', or 'Honeyed Apricot'. They are sweet but also tasty also salty, a combination that is strange at first, then addictive. Dried longans in their shells are totally different from the fresh or canned fruit. The shell becomes thin, brittle and easily cracked while the fruit has turned dark, rather like a large, round raisin.


Walnut and date 'cake' is a sticky, fudge-like creation but pleasant and not too sweet. A word of advice: some of these sweets are wrapped twice and the inner wrapping which looks like fine food wrap is really rice paper which is meant to be eaten with the sweet. Don't try to remove it -- it defies all efforts. Perhaps the most popular ending to a meal is fortune cookies. These too are sold in packets, but are so much nicer if freshly made.