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.