The Malaysiafiles: Part 5- Ice, Ice, Baby

The final part of the Malaysiafiles 2014 and another of my favourite things: iced drinks and desserts. Perfect for when the sun is shining and it's hot enough outside that you could physically cook yourself by midday.

I've mentioned things like cendol and ice kacang before, but no-one does it better than the Indonesians and Malaysians, which is where these things come from (there is apparently quite a fiery debate about who did what version of which dessert first, but I'm definitely not qualified to comment on that one).

Ice Kacang and Cendol are similar in the way that they both involve shaved ice (the best kind being snow-soft ice), with sweet syrups (often palm sugar syrup and condensed milk). Now here's where the variations come in: Ice kacang is almost always a mish-mash of delights such as agar jelly, grass jelly, sweet red beans, sweetcorn, palm seeds and fruits, like these:

Cendol, though, is named after the green, pandan-fragrant strands of jelly that's added to the shaved ice dessert. They kind of look like worms, but that's part of the fun.

Cendol seems to come in two different forms, each with its own region of origin (again, hotly debated). One of them is basically like ice kacang with added 'cendol', lbut my favourite way is simply cendol jelly with coconut milk poured over ice and palm sugar syrup:

I did giggle a bit at the sign.

There are simpler icy drinks to cool you down on muggy days though, like iced lemon and sea coconut drinks:

And other mixed ice drinks (this one was cendol and grass jelly with milk and golden syrup- strange but good!)

And of course, sweet red bean ice drinks:

This one came in a small JUG. <3

Last but certainly not least, there is iced Milo, and even better: Milo dinosaur.

It's quite obvious that Milo is quite a big thing in South East Asia.

It's quite nostalgic for me: I always associate the chocolatey, malty drink with visiting my cousins in Australia or Malaysia when I was little. However it was only relatively recently I discovered the existence of the Milo dinosaur.

This is a normal iced Milo:

And this is a Milo dinosaur:

It comes with EXTRA MILO on top. Best. Idea. Ever. Something that's easy to re-create at home, too (which has very dangerous implications for my waistline).

Well kids, that's it from the Malaysiafiles 2014.

Want to try making the wormy green things that are cendol for your own icy dessert adventures? Of course you do! Head on over to my blog Tashcakes! for my cendol recipe and to find out how it's done.

The Malaysiafiles: Part 3- Kuih and Sweets

One of my favourite, favourite foods of all time: nyonya kuih.

Nyonya refers to the fusion of Chinese and Malay-style cooking in particular, but can also include fusions from other areas in South East Asia. 'Kuih' is Malay for 'cake', although rather than the spongy cakes we're used to, they're often made from glutinous rice flour and are dense and custard-y.

This is kuih talam, my favourite of all the kuihs: it's got a sweet green pandan custard layer, and a white coconut layer that's slightly salty as well as sweet on top: the flavours balance each other out perfectly.

Some other kuis include kuih lapis ('layer cake'), which is made of many colourful layers,  and kuih dadar, a pandan-flavoured crêpe rolled up with gula melaka (palm sugar)-sweetened coconut inside. I've actually made my own versions of kuih dadar and kuih lapis on my blog Tashcakes!, although I'm working on a more improved recipe for kuih lapis.

(The centre sweet it a glutinous rice ball with sweet peanut filling)

The test of a good kuih lapis is if you can peel the layers apart from each other- I need to work on that when I improve my recipe!

As you can see on the plate above, there were also more Chinese-y style glutinous rice sweets, such as the peanut-filled ball in the middle. There were also banana-flavoured ones with red bean, green pandan or pink food colouring in the middle, and one very strange one...

The strange one I'm referring to is the dark grey sticky rice cake at the bottom left of the last pic up there. It's dyed that colour by the herb that's used to flavour it. It had a bland, herbal taste to it, and wasn't helped by the fact that the herb is affectionately nicknamed 'chicken poo leaf'. Still, an interesting thing to try, and of course there were plenty of other personal favourites to eat such as pisang goreng (fried bananas: banana fritters):

There were also purple sweet potato fritters, look at how pretty!

Something else I had never tried before was honeycomb cake, so-called because of the air bubbles that become trapped in the cake batter during baking. It was delicious and caramel-y, and really soft and light.

One more unusual but awesome thing I tried seemed like a standard Western-style pastry at first, but it turned out to have a twist:

Cinnamon swirl danish pastry, right? Well, not quite. It is sweet like a danish pastry, but instead of danish pastry, it's a deep fried doughnut-type affair; and instead of cinnamon, it's five spice. Surprising if you're not expecting it, but it worked very well.

Finally, we also ate durian pancakes: thin, delicate crêpes filled with sweetened fresh cream and fresh durian. True to durian form, you could smell these things from tables away (a signature pungent smell of custard, caramel and rotting onions), and also true to form, they were absolutely delicious.

Next time, during Part 4 of the Malaysiafiles, I'll be continuing with sweet food to explore delicious shaved ice desserts and drinks.