One of the things I like best about Vietnam is the café culture. And by café, I mean any collection of plastic stools on the sidewalk, set up by an entrepreneurial local who mixes drinks for her neighbors. At any time of the day, along the streets of Saigon, Hanoi, Hoi An, etc., the Vietnamese just crouch around wobbly pastel tables and sip their drink of choice. Whether it's cafe sua da, sugarcane juice, aloe vera shake, or passionfruit juice, the icy beverages are practically lifesavers in a sweltering climate. 

If a fruit grows in abundance in Vietnam, you can be sure it is pulsed into a shake. And avocados are everywhere. I grew up associating avocados with salty foods: mashed into guacamole, fanned on chicken sandwiches, sprinkled with sea salt and eaten straight. So a sweet shake was something of a novelty. 

But it makes sense. Because avocado flesh is naturally neither sweet nor salty, it's a tabula rasa for any creamy concoction you want to make.

Since the shake comes out rather thick, and contains both avocados and sweetened condensed milk (not exactly diet foods), I consider it more of a dessert than a light drink. But you can always thin it out with a little more milk and crushed ice.

At first glance, anyone who didn't grow up in an Asian culture might scrunch up her nose at herbal jelly. It's black, it's shiny, and it jiggles. But really, herbal jelly, or grass jelly, is like JELL-O, only naturally colored. Whole Foods is losing a big opportunity to market this as the next "it" health food.

Maybe it's the fact that it takes the shape of the tin can it comes from, that may turn people off. If, as a culture, Americans have moved past canned cranberry sauce, we might not be too thrilled with something similarly ridged but not candy-colored. Although grass jelly is made from an herb in the mint family, the taste is pretty neutral. Which is why Asians love it in desserts. In Hong Kong cafés and dessert shops serve grass jelly with mangoes, coconut, and other tropical produce. At bubble tea shops like Saint Alp's you can opt for little grass jelly bits instead of tapioca pearls.

Has this ever happened to you? Over the weekend I had a frustrating night that involved two big zip files, a remote server, and the slowest internet connection on earth. The next morning I was so tired that I overfilled the coffeemaker with water and flooded the kitchen counter, dumped salt instead of sugar in my coffee, then realized I had forgotten to put grounds in the machine in the first place.

Good thing that I baked the night before, and not when my brain was as smoggy as a Chinese city. I made these matcha almond icebox cookies for exactly these moments, when I wake up famished and in desperate need of baked goods. (The tea part lets me pretend my breakfast is healthy. That and also eating a banana.)

These are one of the easiest cookies to make, and they look elegant enough for parties. (In fact, I should have baked them for my alternative tea party two Saturdays ago.) The earthy matcha goes brilliantly with coffee, and the almonds add a roasted nuttiness. Just try not to finish them in one sitting.

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Related recipes:

Goji Oatmeal-Almond Cookies

Ceylon Tea Banana Bread

Rose Tea Rice Pudding

I first fell in love with mochi in college. At Trader Joe's, a 10 minute drive away, there was an addictive mochi ice cream that brought me back week after week. I loved the mind-tingling coldness of each bite. I loved the sweet glutinous rice that stuck to my teeth and forced me to run for floss afterward. I even sucked up the cost of $3.99 for a box of 4 tiny pieces, which put a dent in which my minimum wage earnings as a library circ assistant. When I told my Hawaiian friend Elaine about my new obsession, she immediately said, "I'll teach you how to make real mochi."

Hawaiian butter mochi, most likely adapted from Filipino bibingka, is the sinful cousin of the dryer, perfectly-shaped Japanese mochi. The following Saturday, Elaine brought over with a box of mochiko, sweet rice flour. (That she hauled boxes of special mochi flour from Hawaii to Boston for school didn't seem strange at the time.) We spent the day making batch upon batch of the most decadent mochi I had ever tasted. It had a sheen that screamed heart attack, but a taste that dared you to stop after one piece. 

I haven't found butter mochi in Shanghai yet, but the Japanese-owned Mochi Sweets has outlets all around town. They're sold cold, and the salesgirls recommend you leave them at room temperature for 15 minutes before eating. So far, the green tea, peach, and dark chocolate are my favoritess, but the shops also have some interesting picks: sakura cherry blossom, pumpkin, and blueberry. And the pumpkin flavor always seems to be discounted for 3 rmb.

I have always preferred blondies to brownies, and it's not because of a dislike for chocolate. Most of the time, I am not a fan of richness of fudgy brownies. And even a fluffier cake-like brownie can't seem to beat a blondie of the same texture. Maybe it's because I eat bar baked goods for the crunchy edges, which the addition of chocolate seems to steal the limelight from. Besides, dried fruit like apricots seems a little odd with fudge.

This recipe is adapted from Food & Wine, but the original wet-to-dry ingredient ratio made the dough too dry and mealy. I adjusted the amount of butter, egg, and brown sugar. And since this is baked in a square 8-inch pan, 12 of my 16 slices ended up with the crispy sweet edge that is best part of any pan dessert.

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Related recipes:

Banana Coconut Muffins

Goji Oatmeal-Almond Cookies

Homemade Almond Milk with Bananas and Honey 

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Apricot Blondies
Adapted from Food & Wine

Lately, I can't help but be wistful about the US. Maybe it's because I'm going back in a month to spend Christmas, a trip that can't come soon enough. Maybe it's lingering euphoria from election day, an adrenaline-filled 24 hours of more giddiness and pride than I can remember. Or maybe it has just been too long.

Getting out of Beijing on weekend hiking trips has helped. Even though the foliage is nowhere near as breathtaking as, say, New England's, I'm happy to enjoy fresher air, some much-needed exercise, and being surrounded by harvests. Once you get out to the villages there will always a slew of produce stands selling the latest fruits and vegetables, with cheaper prices and better quality than in Beijing. 

And of course, apples are everywhere now. You can get a 5-kilo bag of slightly bruised apples for about 11 RMB, or $1.61. These are good for baking, though sometimes I'll splurge on nice unblemished ones for a few RMB more.

The natural thing to bake for any nostalgia-struck American would be apple pie, but I'm what you would call a lazy baker. Apple crumbles, with no need for lattice tops or any other sort of crusts, take much less effort.

There's more to wonton wrappers than just encasing pork and shrimp, however delicious the result is. If you're in need of a quick dessert, these chocolate and banana wontons take almost no time to make.

I have seen some recipes for dessert wontons that call for deep frying. With these wontons, I was able to use a bare minimum of oil (about 3/4 cup) and still achieve crispness. The trick is to refrain from getting fancy with with folding, and stick to the simple triangle. The flatness of the resulting wonton makes it easier to fry up all around the melt the chocolate inside. 

As for the filling, I just finely chopped some bananas and a milk chocolate Ritter Bar. No need to pre-melt the chocolate. Just make sure you don't overdo the filling; a heaping tablespoon of mixed banana and chocolate is more than adequate. And afterward, just spinkle some powdered sugar for presentation, or even granulated sugar if you happen to be out of the former like I was.

Either way, you get a simple dessert in about 15 minutes.

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Related recipes:

Homemade Almond Milk with Bananas and Honey
MFK Fisher's Chocolate Pudding
Coconut Hot Chocolate

Note to self: Never bake cookies before breakfast, especially if you are starving.

Yesterday, faced with the prospect of no milk accompaniment for cornflakes, I decided to hold out until lunch. I wanted to try out a recipe for almond cookies and told myself I would only eat 1 or 2, then fix myself a sensible lunch. However, hunger and gluttony got the best of me, and I ended up wolfing down eight.

You live, you learn.

My father used to own a Cantonese bakery and he would make these enormous, 5-inch wide crisp almond cookies with an egg-y sheen. I wanted more manageable-sized cookies, so I tried a recipe out of Chinatown: Sweet Sour Spicy Salty, a book I borrowed from the school I teach at. A recipe from the book I tried before was a dud, but fortunately this one turned out fine, giving me crisp and buttery textured cookies.

The only alteration I made was adding a half cup of ground almonds for a more nutty flavor. Although next time methinks I should replace the all-purpose flour with almond flour from Carrefour's enormous flour selection. (Or cashew flour, or even goji flour. Ah, Carrefour. What unusual flour don't you have?)

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Other cookie recipes to try:

I'm sure most Westerners who have ever dined with a group of Chinese are familiar with the the following scenario. After a ___-course lavish banquet, you look forward to something nice and sweet to cap off a great experience. Your Chinese hosts inform you that you'll love the dessert; all Westerners love dessert. This one is a Chinese specialty. Anticipation mounts. Then the long-awaited dessert arrives...in the form of red bean soup. You take one sip, utter an "Mmm!" with all the false bravado you can muster, and wonder if anyone will notice you "watering" that plant close by.

Yes, it is well known that most Chinese desserts are merely tolerated by Westerners. While I personally don't mind red bean soup or other sweet dessert soups every once in a while, other people, like a certain significant other of mine, have developed an intense fear of them. It's understandable. While in the West we crave and lust after rich chocolates, cakes, and pies, the Chinese palate can tolerate only moderately sweet things. Thus, Chinese desserts never seem sweet enough, but anyone living or traveling extensively in China can't help but encounter them again and again. 

Not long ago I picked up an outdated Chinese cooking magazine from the bargain bin of a magazine stand. I was enamored of the existentialist thought-provoking photos inside, such as this gem:

Cherries, of course, are the fruits used in the most classical French preparation of clafoutis. As recently as 2 weeks ago, black cherries were in abundance all over my local markets. I bought them for eating whole, for making black cherry iced tea, but not for baking. Now it's too late, and the only cherries left are rotten-looking and expensive. 

Yesterday at the grocery store I grabbed some lychees, which still seem to be semi-abundant.  Not best looking lychees ever, but good enough for Beijing. Lychees hold their shape very well when baked, so I just soaked them in rum and made tropics-influenced clafoutis with a coconut milk custard. They took longer to bake than I thought, because the deepness of my ramekins. But they did make my kitchen, and entire apartment for that matter, smell like lychees. Really, there is no need for scented candles or home fragrance sprays when you live with a baker.