Thai-Twist Desserts

Chefs Make Tropical Fruits Taste Even Fresher

By Caroline Mays

Recreating a taste of home, experimenting with new flavors or taking a Thai approach to cooking – these are the many reasons behind the chefs making Thai desserts and Thai-flavored desserts outside of Thailand.

Coconut, pandan, sticky rice and mango, salak, Thai tea: for some, these may be familiar or nostalgic flavors; for others, they may be something new and interesting. Regardless of whether you’ve eaten them one time or one thousand times, dessert shops and cafes in the U.S. are putting fresh twists on classic Thai flavors.

Mark Wiens, an American-born and internationally-raised food blogger and restaurant owner in Thailand, described Thai desserts as being generally “sweet and sometimes filling.” In other words, they are more substantial than what he called the “airy Western style dessert” characterized by “sweet syrups, coconut cream, tropical fruits, and sweet sticky rice,” he wrote on Migrationology.com.

InFusion Cooking Classes Koh Samui, a cooking school based in Koh Samui, Thailand, divides Thai desserts into “families” of coconut-based dishes, rice- or starch-based dishes, root vegetable and legume-based dishes, tropical fruits, jellies, Portuguese-influenced egg dishes and iced desserts and sweet cold drinks.

Toppings on desserts are also an important element in Thai dessert culture. Los Angeles-based food writer Kat Thompson, who specializes in Southeast Asian cooking, emphasizes this, saying, “Many Thai people love fruity, seedy, and crunchy toppings on their ice cream for textural contrast.”

According to InFusion, Thai sweets are “not conceived as a single structured dessert served at the end of a meal but as snacks enjoyed at any time of day.” InFusion says that rather than being sold as a course in restaurants, “they are ubiquitous in markets, in specialized stalls and in a few dedicated shops,” which “contributes to their relative lack of visibility outside Thailand.”

Maybe not anymore.

At Moom Maam in Southern California, founder and chef Darwin Wai creates fantastical gelato, often mixing traditional Thai fruits and vegetables with ingredients associated with other cultures and especially Mexican flavors.

“I want to introduce people to Thai basil,” says Wai, who created a Thai basil pesto gelato with cashews instead of pine nuts. “The olive oil helps round out the basil flavors,” he explains. (There is no garlic involved.) Wai’s gelato shop is located in Torrance, CA., and he also runs a booth every Sunday at Smorgasburg in Downtown Los Angeles.

Some of Wai’s other delightful cross-cultural creations include a durian mezcal gelato, a Fernet and grass jelly flavor, and riceberry horchata scoops. “People love [the riceberry horchata gelato],” he says.

Riceberry, a superfood, is a purple breed of Thai rice that is a “crossover between black sticky rice and jasmine rice,” Wai explaines.

People who “have no idea what riceberry is” will order the flavor “because they want horchata,” Wai says, smiling. “And Thai people know what riceberry is, and not horchata.” Everybody can simultaneously relish a favorite childhood flavor, while also experiencing a hit of something new.

L’moon Creamery, a popular tea and dessert shop in Pasadena and Upland, CA. sells Thai tea soft-serve with several options of toppings to add onto it, including Oreo crumbles, honey boba, coconut jelly and grass jelly. Another customer favorite is Thai tea with a brulee top; — “torching the drink” started in Taiwan, the founders say — that was later brought to Thailand.

The founders of l’moon, Net Yang and Jet Tepson, brew their Thai tea from loose-leaf black tea leaves from the U.S. and Thailand. “The tea base needs to be really strong,” Yang explains, because it will be mixed with cream and sugar. “I became caffeine-addicted,” while they developed the tea base. Tepson explains why they chose soft serve over ice cream: it “doesn’t numb your taste buds,” she says, “because it is warmer than ice cream, so you can use less sugar and fat.”

Both Yang and Tepson refer to their native Thailand as a food-crazy country and from Thailand, explaining that their Thai friends give them feedback on their soft serve batches. Yang says that, in Thai, “lamoon” means smooth or balanced, and that you could use it to describe “colors, a scene, or a mood.” Yang and Tepson want customers to feel lamoon.

Traditionally-brewed Thai tea was also the impetus for Pepe Chiaracharuwat and Por Harnsongkram to open their Thai dessert shop, Nuar, in New York City. Chiaracharuwat was born and raised in Bangkok, then moved to New York for college. “I had a craving for a Thai dessert that felt like home,” Chiaracharuwat says. “Me and my business partner, who’s also Thai. . . we started to think like, Hey, why don’t we open our own dessert place?”

At Nuar, Chiaracharuwat and Harnsongkram make their tea fresh every day by steeping tea leaves in milk “so we can get the most flavor and aroma,” Chiaracharuwat says. They use that tea in all sorts of desserts, such as their Thai tea banana pudding, which features Thai-tea infused custard with banana slices, whipped cream and vanilla wafers. For Valentine’s Day 2026, they added layers of strawberry puree and a small heart-shaped frozen strawberry on top.

They also use Thai tea in a kaya toast dish. Rather than serving kaya sandwich-style, they make their version of kaya toast by slicing the toast into pieces and covering them in Thai tea, pandan, or coconut-flavored sauce and ice cream. Customers can further customize the texture with toppings such as cookie crumbles, red bean paste, toasted marshmallow, toasted coconut, or thong muan, which is a rolled, crunchy wafer with sesame seeds.

But not everything is experimental. Customers longing for home can indulge in more traditional sweets, too, such as nom yen (Thai pink milk), traditionally made with a combination of milks, ice, and syrup made from the salak fruit. The flavor of nom yen is “sweet, creamy, floral, and slightly fruity.” Chiaracharuwat says that “it’s super nostalgic in Thailand – a childhood favorite you’ll see everywhere from street stalls to cafes.”

Perhaps the boom in food trucks in the last 20 years provided the perfect environment for Thai desserts to grow and thrive in the U.S. Like the inside of a coconut, they are a welcome, sweet surprise.

Photos by Caroline Mays

(This article appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)