Oceania desserts

Oceanic dessert — Australian, New Zealand, Pacific Islands — combines a strong British colonial inheritance with the year-round abundance of tropical and temperate fruit and the influences of newer migration (Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese). The defining national sweets are sharp: pavlova (claimed by both Australia and New Zealand), lamingtons (coconut-coated chocolate sponge squares), Anzac biscuits (oat-and-syrup biscuits dating from World War I), caramel slice, fairy bread, and the New Zealand hokey pokey ice cream.

Across the Pacific Islands, the dessert tradition draws on coconut, banana, taro, breadfruit and cassava, often steamed in banana leaf or baked in earth ovens, and is more closely related to the sweets of Southeast Asia than to the British-derived sweets of the Antipodean mainland.

Modern Australian café culture has also produced its own distinctive contributions — the freakshake, the matcha-cruffin, the long black with a small biscuit on the saucer — that have travelled widely.