With only five ingredients in this Breton pastry (flour, butter, sugar, yeast, and salt), the folding technique decides almost everything. Butter is wrapped in the dough and sugar is scattered over each fold, three times in all. In a hot oven the sugar melts into a glassy, dark caramel shell while the layers inside stay moist with butter.
Cream and milk are set softly with sheet gelatin, then topped with a red sauce of omija syrup and lemon juice and a few berries. The sauce goes on only after the panna cotta has fully set, which keeps it from bleeding into the cream and leaves a clean red layer.
Australian lamingtons start with cubes of plain sponge cake, dunked one at a time in a glossy sauce of dark chocolate, butter, and milk, then rolled in coconut while the coating is still wet so the flakes cling all over.
Sweet potato cubes jut from the surface like an ogre's horns or iron club, which is said to be where the name oni manju comes from. In Aichi it stood in for rice when food ran short during and after the war, and with no bean paste it relies on the potato's own sweetness and a heavy, chewy batter.
Lemon juice, egg yolks, and sugar are stirred over low heat into a curd, poured into a baked shortcrust shell, and chilled until set. The curd comes off the heat before it boils, once a line drawn through the thin coat on the spatula holds, and cream stirred in afterward, then a pass through a sieve, leaves it silky. Only the yellow outer peel is zested; the white pith underneath tastes bitter.
With 400ml of cream to only 120ml of milk, this panna cotta still trembles when nudged with a spoon after it sets, and melts almost as soon as it is in your mouth. The stove work takes a few minutes; the rest is at least four hours of waiting in the fridge. Thinly sliced strawberries go on top.
Holes poked into a hot lemon loaf let a sharp lemon syrup soak right through, and as it cools a thin layer of sugar crystals sets on top with a slight crunch. In Britain it is a plain, undecorated afternoon tea staple.
Set with powdered gelatin, this vanilla panna cotta holds its shape when turned out onto a plate while the center still shivers. The sugar is kept modest, so vanilla and dairy come through clean. To unmold, only the base of each cup goes briefly into warm water rather than warming the whole thing.
The lemon filling is thickened with cornstarch and finished with butter for gloss. Meringue goes on while that curd is still hot and is spread right to the crust, which seals the bottom and keeps it from weeping, and a short spell at 200°C browns only the tips of the peaks. Chill it before slicing for clean layers.
Frozen milk shaved into snow-fine flakes melts creamier and more opaque than plain water ice, which is what sets this bingsu apart. One spoonful can pick up sweet red beans, chewy rice cake, sliced strawberries, nutty multigrain and soybean powders, and crunchy almonds from the mound at once. The beans are tasted before any sugar goes in and cooled fully so they do not melt the ice on contact.
Butter, sugar, eggs, and flour go in at nearly equal weights, giving the dense, close crumb of a classic pound cake, and lemon zest and juice turn it bright. Rubbing the zest into the flour first spreads its oils so the aroma is even throughout. A crack running down the top is the sign of a good rise, and a thin powdered sugar glaze, poured once the cake has cooled, sets into a sweet, glossy film.
Cut a Brazilian pavê and four clean stripes show: a thin biscuit layer, chocolate cream, pale custard and a meringue top. The biscuit is not store-bought but baked thin right in the dish, then soaked with milk warmed with cinnamon and cognac. A single condensed-milk custard is split in two and chocolate goes into only one half, so both creams share the same base. With the creams cooled fully before layering and at least six hours in the freezer, it is a dessert to begin the day before.
Strips of dough laid in a lattice, in the traditional Austrian way, let the raspberry jam bubble up and show through in deep ruby squares. Ground almonds in the dough make the crust shorter and more crumbly than a plain flour pastry.
Beating the syrup after it leaves the heat is deliberate: it turns glossy candy opaque and gives pralines a slightly crumbly bite instead of a chewy caramel one. Cream and brown sugar hide the color cues of a clear syrup, so a candy thermometer, its tip clear of the pan base, decides when to stop at 116°C.
Lotus seed paste is wrapped in a dough of golden syrup, oil, and alkaline water, pressed into a patterned mold, and baked for the Mid-Autumn Festival. Here the crust and filling are close to equal in weight, and the syrupy pastry counts for as much as the smooth lotus paste. Fresh from the oven the crust is still firm; a day in an airtight container softens it until it melds with the filling.
Ripe saba bananas are slit into fans, dipped in a rice-flour batter and fried, then given a rough, craggy shell by drizzling extra batter into the oil beside them and pressing the crisp bits on. That shaggy crust is the point of Indonesian pisang goreng, as opposed to a smooth single coat. Bananas with dark-spotted skins give the sweetness and softness the dish needs, and no syrup or sugar goes on top. Draining on a rack keeps the underside crisp.
The dough is fine semolina, which crumbles apart in the mouth, and each cookie hides a date paste spiced with cinnamon. After the filling is wrapped, a mold or fork presses the pattern on top, and they leave the oven while the tops are still pale and only the edges have gone light gold. Baked any darker, they lose that crumbly tenderness and turn hard.
Melted sugar caught at pale amber foams up to two or three times its volume within seconds of adding baking soda, then cools into a thin disc that snaps cleanly when tapped. It has to come off the heat right at that color; one shade darker and it turns bitter. The shape cutter only presses an outline, and the disc is left alone until it has cooled hard.
Browning the butter until it foams and smells toasty gives these madeleines a hazelnut-like depth that plain melted butter cannot. The hump on the back comes from resting the batter in the fridge for at least 1 hour: cold batter meeting a hot mold sets at the edges first while the center surges up. The crisp edges go soft within a few hours.
Cooled cooked rice is rinsed, dried in a low oven for three to four hours, toasted in a dry pan until the grains puff, then bound with syrup into bite-size clusters. The grains need to be dry enough to snap under a fingertip instead of bending, or they stay soggy in the pan. Bits of colored dried mochi are scattered through.
Two flat loaves are baked separately, one filled with sweet red bean paste and one with sweet green pea paste, then stacked with whipped cream and strawberry jam between them. Cut through, it shows red bean, pea, cream, and jam in layers. The cream goes on only after both loaves have cooled right through; on warm bread it melts and runs off the edges.
The hollowed shell of a mini pineapple becomes the bowl: its own flesh is blended smooth, sweetened, poured back in, and frozen under the cut-off top. Stirring the frozen edges into the middle once or twice partway through keeps the ice crystals small and the texture smooth. Fresh pineapple leaves a slight tingle on the tongue.
Brown sugar instead of white gives this pound cake a caramel edge that lines up with the woodsy sweetness of maple syrup. The crumb stays tight and buttery, as a pound cake should, with toasted pecans scattered through every slice. It tastes better the next day: wrapped overnight, the maple flavor moves through the whole loaf and the cake turns rounder and more even in flavor.
Melted marshmallow, not a boiled sugar syrup, holds the small crisp rice pieces together. The marshmallow comes off the heat as soon as the white lumps disappear. The mix is pressed into the tin only enough to fill the gaps; packing it down squeezes out the air between grains and makes a hard bar.