Korean desserts

Korean traditional sweets are a quieter category than the country's savoury cooking, but no less considered. The classical sweets — called hangwa — include yaksik (a sticky-rice cake with chestnuts, dates and honey), yakgwa (deep-fried honey pastries), and dasik (small moulded sweets eaten with tea). The flavours run on honey, sesame, chestnut, jujube, ginger, and the gentle vegetal sweetness of sweet potato.

The contemporary Korean dessert scene is something else again: an enormous café culture in Seoul, Busan and beyond has produced bingsu (shaved-ice mountains topped with everything from injeolmi to Oreos), hotteok (filled griddle pancakes), and the cronut-descended croffle. Each year a new viral dessert appears and is taken seriously.

The thread running through both old and new is a love of texture: the chew of rice cakes, the cracking shell of hotteok, the snowflake mouth- feel of milk-based bingsu, the sticky pull of yaksik.