“What do you eat?” – Part II – Food in the outside world

     So what do I eat when leaving the safety of the campus? Well one answer is dessert! Since the campus canteen never serves any desserts (my first thought of “Oh my god! How will I live?” was quickly replaced by “Oh my god! I’m going to lose so much weight!”), I have to look elsewhere for my sugar fixes. There is a small store near the canteen selling ice creams and sweets, but nobody really seems to go there except for drinks. And whenever we go out for meals, there is never a question of “shall we have dessert or no?”, so I thought for a while that maybe Chinese culture just isn’t that into desserts (especially when you compare British culture, where many women admit to not being able to go one day without some chocolate passing their lips). However, a quick venture into any food area of a shopping mall quickly dispelled this theory. There are in fact plenty of sweets, and the Chinese are very good at making them. They even have their own version of custard tarts that are available here, and can be bought for the great price of 35 p. There are also many French dessert counters serving traditional patisserie type cakes, and I’ve even seen two stores selling macarrons in all the traditional flavours! However, it is not French cuisine that I’ve come here for, so I’ve made it my mission to get through as many Chinese cakes and bakes as I can while I’m here. There are so many things coming in a multitude of colours and shapes that I don’t have a clue where to start.

Array of multi-coloured sweet balls

So after the custard tart, I tried one of these purple balls above (I think it was made with tapioca flour). It was great.

We also had this delicious “bell cake” which was kind of like a bell-shaped waffle but with a hot custard filling inside – so delicious! Definitely going to have this again.

The range of sweets varies from ones where the flavours I can recognise and describe at a fairly accurate level, to the downright alien, but nevertheless tasty:

Ground black sesame and some other nut with some kind of sugar pastry strands?

At the other end of the spectrum, there are the familiar brands, but with a slightly different twist:

To be honest, I’m surprised they didn’t print “Oreo” on the cookie in Chinese characters as well! But hey, if they can come up with great flavours like strawberry and peach cream for the Asian market, I’m all for it!

There is also another version and I think this is mint ice cream flavoured:

Or is it green tea? I’m not sure, but it has a bit of a funny aftertaste, think I’ll be steering clear of this one afterwards.

I have also now tried the milk! I decided to give it a go because there were some pretty reliable looking fresh milk cartons, and there were loads of adverts around so I thought it was worth a try. Also I just missed it too much!

           Really I’d heard a lot of bad things about the dairy industry in China, and I wanted to see for myself how bad it really was. Overall this milk wasn’t actually so bad. It only tasted slightly watered down (at least, I hope it was water they diluted it with!) and had more or less the flavour of UHT milk, which is tolerable. Obviously it wasn’t going to taste exactly the same as back home (heck, there is even a difference between Hungarian and British milk), but it was milky and refreshing, and tasted infinitely better than that vile excuse for soy milk they serve at the canteen, so I think I’ll be getting this more regularly in future for my calcium hit.

            I also had a moment of madness and decided to try this:

              "What’s chicken doing in a blog about desserts?” I hear you say (or quite possibly also, “how much longer is this blog post going to go on for?”). Actually, this isn’t chicken breast, but the flesh of the infamous durian! Ever since I heard about durians I thought they sounded so funny, I just had to try some. Typical foreigner noob, I didn’t really know what I was letting myself in for. Affectionately known in Asian countries as a fruit which smells a bit funny but tastes delicious, I wanted to see for myself what all the fuss was about. Wrapped up in a neat little package, it seemed fine on the way home, but when I opened it, boy did it smell! Not only did it smell very strongly, but it tasted very weird, so I only had a tiny bit and left the rest in my fridge to tackle later. My Chinese friend said that many people don’t like their first taste, but grow to love it, and it was said to be especially good for women, and helps with our complexion. However, my second taste the next day wasn’t getting much better, although it was becoming more tolerable. The smell in my room was definitely breaching unignorable levels though. For such was the strength of this fruit, that despite being kept in the fridge, it filled the room with an air of slightly rotting bananas/sour milk/sweaty gym clothes. I just couldn’t get rid of it for days, even after trying to finish most of it off, and parting with the packet in the bins outside. Worse still, the fridge still smells of it, and I don’t know how long it will be til that dies down, if ever. Perhaps I’ll try again in a few weeks, and maybe like Lu says, I’ll have grown to like it.....

                   Despite these weird experiences, I have to share with you guys an excellent trip to a proper ice-cream parlour style dessert shop called Honeymoon Dessert. These stores are dotted all around Shanghai, and specialise in Hong Kong style desserts, and they’re quite famous throughout Shanghai, and I’m sure in other parts of China too. There’s everything from Durian to mango with sago or jelly, or other classic Asian flavours, with or without ice cream, custard and a whole range of other tasty things. I opted for this blueberry dish:

At 30 RMB, it wasn’t cheap, and cost more than some mains in some restaurants! But it was a special one-off treat, and it was so delicious! In the bowl were some blueberries, a scoop of blueberry ice cream, a sweet Thai rice ball all swimming in a vanilla-flavoured iced milk liquid. It was one of the best desserts I’d had, and I’d definitely go back for more! Next time I definitely want to try the green tea flavoured ice cream too.

  So, it seems like there is plenty of choice for desserts in China, and I probably won’t lose so much weight after all!