For this western style pastry, I used Thai sliced sweet palms seeds. The palm seeds are naturally sweet, and served in syrup making them idea to make sweet pastries like this one.

Ingredients
1 Packet of Puff Pastry
50 gms Tinned Palm Seeds in Heavy Syrup

Preparation
1. Cut the pastry to 5×5 square.
2. Slice the palm seeds.
3. Spoon some of the seeds into the middle of each pastry square and fold the corners into the middle.
4. Brush the pastry with milk.
5. Half way through the baking, brush the pie and pastry with some of the heavy syrup from the tin. This will keep the seeds moist.
6. At the end brush the pastry with a little more syrup to give it a shine

Thai muffins are steamed rather than baked and so tend to be softer & more moist. This dried fruit muffin is a typical Thai style muffin made with chopped dried fruits and raisins and scented with floral water, if you prefer you can substitute vanilla for the rose water.

Ingredients
200 gms Wheat Flour
1 Teaspoon Baking Soda
1 Tablespoon Yeast
2 Eggs
150 gms Sugar
110 ml Water
1 Teaspoon Lemon Juice
4 Tablespoons Condensed Milk
1 Teaspoon Rose Water
30 gms Dried Fruits (Cherry, Pineapple, Mango, Raisin etc.)
Metal Muffin Cups

Preparation
1. Mix the flour with the baking soda.
2. Whip the eggs, sugar, yeast, and water together. The mixture should be creamy.
3. Add the flour and mix in until smooth.
4. Add the condensed milk, lemon juice, rose water and continue to mix.
5. Stir in the dried fruit.
6. Grease the muffin cups with a little butter or oil.
7. Spoon in the mixture.
8. Steam for 15 minutes in a Chinese steamer.

You’ve seen the sweet version of Kanom Tokyo before. There is also this savoury version in Thailand, which is a very simple dish of hotdog sausages wrapped in pancakes and served with sweet chilli sauce. After yesterdays complicated picnic box, I thought I do something a little simpler today.

Ingredients
100 gms Wheat Flour
3 Teaspoons Bicarbonate of Soda
1 Teaspoon Salt
1 Egg
4 Tablespoons Sugar
2 Tablespoons Melted Butter
4-5 Hot Dog Sausages (Smoked is best)

Preparation
1. Mix Then wheat flour, milk, egg, salt, sugar and bicabonate Of soda together and blend for 1 minute.
2. Heat a saucepan, add a knob of butter and melt it, and pour in enough of the batter to make a pancake. For this we need pancakes the same size as the hotdog. Cooked on both sides.
3. Heat the hotdogs separately, in very hot brine.
4. Roll the pancakes around the sausage.
5. When I make these, I like to spread sweet chilli sauce over the pancakes as a sweet spicy layer, but when you buy them from street vendors, they usually serve the dipping sauce separately

These pancakes are a Thai favorite and very very rich. There are many types of fillings, for the photograph I’ve made two, taro filled ones at the back and cream filled ones at the front. Another common fillings is shredded young coconut. Prepare the filling before you start the pancakes, as you make each pancake you will fill them and roll them up.

Ingredients
100 gms Wheat Flour
3 Teaspoons Bicarbonate of Soda
1 Teaspoon Salt
1 Egg
4 Tablespoons Sugar
300 ml Evaporated Milk
2 Tablespoons Melted Butter
1 Teaspoon Vanilla Essence

Preparation
1. Sift the flour mix and bicarbonate of soda together.
2. Whip an egg until fluffy, add the sugar, salt and blend. Add the evaporated milk, flour, butter, and vanilla essence and continue blending. Leave 20 minutes to rest.
3. You will need a good clean flat non stick frying pan for this, a little butter while frying can help, but these pancakes are very soft and need to be fried carefully.
4. Heat the frying pan. Pour a small amount of the mixture onto the pan and use a spoon to shape it into a circle and fill any holes. For this recipe you want small pancakes, no more than 8cms across.
5. Fry gently until the pancake is brown, then turn it over. While the other side is cooking, spread some of the filling onto the pancake, then roll it up and set it on a serving plate. Serve warm.

Ingredients  for Cream Filling
1 Egg
3 Tablespoons Sugar
1 Teaspoon Salt
100 ml Water
100 ml Evaporated Milk
5 Tablespoons Butter
2 Tablespoons Corn Flour

Preparation for Cream Filling
1. Whip the egg with the sugar and salt.
2. Add the water, evaporated milk, butter, and corn flour and put into a saucepan and cook over a low heat until the cream is mixed and thick, then leave to cool.

Ingredients Taro Filling
50 gms Taro
2 Tablespoons Sugar
1 Tablespoon Oil

Preparation for Taro Filling
1. Steam the taro until cooked.
2. Purée the taro in a blender together with the sugar.
3. Heat the taro in a saucepan over a low heat, to drive off excess water and thicken it. Once it’s thickened, leave it to cool.

This dessert is strands of sugary cooked egg yolk,flavored with rose water (or vanilla essence in water also works). It’s difficult to make. I’ve tried many times and this is the first time I’ve managed to get the strands to work.
The strands are streams of egg yolk drizzled through a fine sieve into a large pan of hot sugar syrup. The strands cook immediately and you end up with sweet golden strands of egg. For this to work, you needs lots and lots of egg yolk, the more egg yolks the better, so don’t reduce the quantity of eggs. Use the largest flattest pan you can find, the more spread out the strands the nicer they look. The duck eggs yolks in the recipe are larger and more yellow than the chicken, and help you achieve the golden colour.
In Thailand they use a piping bag with a special nozzle with many fine holes especially for this. But I don’t have one, what I found works is a large sugar shaker, filled with the egg mixture, you tip it upside down and the egg runs as streams through the holes, which I slowly moved forwards and backwards, left to right over the pan until all the mixture had gone through.
As with many Thai desserts, we flavour them with flower essence, using rose water or jasmin flower essence in water. However you can use vanilla essence in water or similar flavouring of your choice if you prefer.

Ingredients
10 Duck Egg Yolks
5 Chicken Egg Yolks
1 Teaspoon Oil
950 ml Rose Water
900 gms Sugar
1-2 teaspoons flavoring (Jasmin Essence, or Vanilla)

Preparation
1. Mix all the egg yolks together, add the oil, sieve to remove any lumps. It is important to remove any lumps of thick parts so the yolk runs freely.
2. Mix water and sugar, bring to the boil and simmer. You want a slightly thick sugar syrup.
3. Add the flavouring to the hot syrup, turn off the heat so the syrup isn’t boiling.
4. Fill you piping bag (or sugar shaker in my case) and pipe the egg yolk into the hot syrup making strands, forwards and backwards until all the mixture has been used.
5. Remove the strands using a pasta tong or similar. You can also put a fork in, and twist the fork so the strands form around the fork into a ball and serve them like that.

This dessert is a mung bean salty sweet dessert so typical of Thailand.

Ingredients For Base
60 gms Mung Bean Flour
800 ml Rose or Jasmin Water
150 gms Sugar
2-3 Food Coloring
Moulds for Setting

Preparation
1. Mix the flour, rose water, and sugar and stir until dissolved.
2. Warm over a medium heat, stir until it goes clear.
3. Fill the moulds to 2/3rds full.

Ingredients For the Coconut Topping
200 ml Coconut Milk
1 1/2 Tablespoon Rice Flour
1/4 Teaspoon Salt

Preparation
1. Mix all the ingredients, warm over a medium heat, stirring until the coconut thickens and rice flour is cooked through.
2. Turn off the heat.
3. Pour a thin layer over the mung bean mixture.
4. Sprinkle a few toasted sesame seeds to garnish

Part sweet, part salt, part smooth, part rough. This dessert consists of many interesting contrasts!

Ingredients for Colored Balls
100 gms Shredded Medium-Old Coconut
100 gms Palm Sugar
300 gms Sticky Rice Flour
Warm Water
1 Tablespoon Cassava Starch Flour
Food Coloring

Preparation
1. Melt the palm sugar in a pan. Add the shredded coconut, and stir while heating until you have a well mixed sticky mixture.
2. Leave to cool, then take spoonfuls of this mixture and roll into 2cm diameter balls, these form the centres.
3. Mix the sticky rice flour, cassava starch, a drop or two of food colouring and enough of the warm water to form a smooth dough.
4. Mix the dough well, divide it into portions, so you have one portion for each of your sweet coconut centres.
5. Roll each portion into a ball then roll it flat to approx 6cm diameter disc. Wrap it round one of the coconut sweets to form a ball. Do this for all the sweets.
6. Boil a pan of water, drop the coloured balls in the pan and cook for 3-5 minutes. Remove and drop into cold water.

Ingredients for White Base
460 gms Coconut Milk
50 gms Rice Flour
Pinch Of Salt

Preparation
1. Mix the flour and salt and the coconut milk.
2. Heat over a medium heat, stirring until the mixture has thickened and the flour cooked through. This takes 2-3 minutes stirring after it thickens. The spoon into cups and add the balls.

As is typical of Asian candy, these candies are only a little bit sweet, the outside has the texture similar to marzipan. Ingredients Filling
70 gms Black and Red Soya Beans
50 gms Sugar
100 ml Oil

Ingredients For Outside
100 gms Wheat Flour ( Bleached Wheat Flour if Available )
100 ml Coconut Milk
30 gms Sugar
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
2-4 Drops Jasmin Flavour
2-3 Drops Food Colouring

Preparation
1. Soak the beans overnight, then clean it and boil for 20 minutes.
2. Blend in a food processor to form a smooth paste.
3. Take the bean paste and warm in a saucepan, add the oil and sugar and keep stirring until the bean paste is thick and nearly dry. Take off the heat and leave to cool.
4. When it’s cool, take small pieces (approx 25g) of the paste and roll them in your hands to form balls. These will form the centre.
5. For the outside, mix the flour, coconut milk, sugar, salt, jasmin and food colouring together.
6. Heat this mixture over a low heat and keep stirring until the flour has cooked through and the mixture thickened and become sticky.
7. Separate it into pieces and again form balls with them, you will need one cover ball for each centre.
8. To form the finished candy, flatten the outer cover into a disc, place a filling ball inside, then fold up the outside around and press the edges together.
9. If you find the mixture is a little too sticky, you can dust your hands with cassava starch.
10. Roll the sweets so they are elongated, and cut them in half.

Everyone of these miniature fruits are made from sweetened yellow bean paste, and food colourings. The shine comes from a glaze made of agar. Don’t be put off, they are not as difficult to make as they look, and you can have a lot of fun with your children making them.
Make each one small, 10-15gms of yellow bean paste is perfect, if you make them too big, they are difficult to dip in the agar later and will not hold their shape. A good way to hold the fruit is to skewer them on toothpicks as you paint and dip them.

Ingredients
200 gms Yellow Bean
150 gms Sugar
1 Teaspoon Salt
100 ml Coconut Milk
Food Coloring

Ingredients  for Glaze
5 gms Agar Jelatin
150 Water
50 gms Sugar

Preparation
1. Soak the yellow beans obernight, steam for 45 minutes.
2. Pound or blend the bean to a paste, add mix with the sugar, salt and coconut milk.
3. Place into a saucepan and heat gently, stirring continuously until the paste thickens, then leave it to cool.
4. Now comes the artistic stage, take small pieces of the yellow bean paste, about 10gms each and form them into fruit shapes.
5. I find it’s a good idea to use toothpicks and a block of foam to hold the shapes while I paint them with the food colouring.
6. Now to glaze, mix the agar with water and heat until the agar has fully dissolved.
7. Leave it to cool slightly, but be careful not to let it set.
8. Dip the fruit into the agar and stand them up by pushing the toothpick into foam or polystyrene. Let the agar set on the fruit, then repeat the process and coat the fruit again with another layer of agar. You may have to reheat the agar in the pan to melt it again each time.

Hints for Each Fruit 

Banana – Bananas are slightly oblong, with 4 stripes running down the sides.

 Chom Pu – These are a Thai fruit, a little pink yellow and orange on the base and make the top slightly green.

Cherries – The stalk I made from a stalk of coriander

Chillies – I rolled out the basic shape and used a blunt knife to make the leaf shape at the top. Then skewer them with a toothpick and paint with food coloring.

Man Cud – the leaves on the top are made by pressing in the top of a pen to give the round leaf shape.

Melon Slices – I found it is easier to not paint the bottom edge of the melon.

Mini Orange – One of my favourites, make the leaf separately and be careful when dipping this one in agar because the leaf can come off.

Mini Sweet Corn – Make a tapering sausage shape, cut a grating into the soya with a sharp knife, then paint with yellow food colouring and green edging.

Mini Tomato – A blunt knife is used to make the star shaped leaves, by pushing down the soft yellow bean paste.

Mini Pears – I made these pears too big, and as you can see one of them bent when I was coating them in agar.

This is a traditional dessert of Thailand, but rice cakes are time consuming to make, and so I’ve made the recipe using store bought rice cakes.

Ingredients
1 Packet Rice Cakes
300 ml Water
400 gms Brown Sugar

Preparation
1. Boil the water in a saucepan.
2. Add the brown sugar and stir to dissolve, continue boiling, as the water boils off, the pan will get hotter than 100 degrees and the sugar will start to change.
3. There are two choices here, I like to eat this with a fudge coating, but it’s common in Thailand to get this with a toffee swirl instead.
4. To check the progress of the sugar, take a bowl of cold water and drop spoonfuls of the boiling sugar in to see what stage it is at. If you have a sugar thermometer, then for toffee you need 150-160 degrees Celsius and for a fudge you need 115-120 degrees.
5. Once you have the sugar at the correct stage, take a sppon and make swirls on the rice cakes. The leave to cool