Retro Sweets and Frozen Treats

Nanaimo Bars

The Nanaimo bar is Canada's most quietly famous sweet, named after the city on Vancouver Island where it is said to have taken hold in the mid twentieth century. It is a no-bake bar built in three distinct layers, and the appeal is entirely in the contrast between them.

• Base: a dense, chewy crumb layer made from biscuit crumbs, desiccated coconut and chopped nuts, bound with melted butter, cocoa and a beaten egg that sets the mixture as it cools.
• Middle: a pale custard buttercream, traditionally flavoured with a spoonful of custard powder, which gives it its distinctive soft yellow colour and gentle vanilla note.
• Top: a thin sheet of melted chocolate poured over the chilled buttercream.

There is no oven involved, which is exactly why it became a fixture of church cookbooks and holiday tins. The one honest difficulty is the chocolate top: pour it while the buttercream is properly cold and firm, and score the portions gently before the chocolate sets hard, or it will crack and shatter when you cut it. Keep the bars chilled and cut them small, because they are rich.

Mango, Curry and Cardamom Ice Cream

This is the sort of recipe that sounds alarming and turns out to make perfect sense. Mango carries sweetness and body, cardamom is already at home in South Asian sweets like kulfi, and a whisper of mild curry spice adds warmth rather than heat. The trick is restraint: the curry note should sit underneath the fruit as a savoury shadow, not announce itself.

A simple approach is to build a custard base, infuse the warm cream with lightly toasted cardamom pods and a very small amount of a gentle curry blend, strain it, then fold through ripe mango puree once cool. Churn as normal. If you want to skip the custard, ripe mango and full-fat coconut milk blend into a no-churn base that suits the tropical flavours nicely. Taste before freezing, because freezing dulls spice and sweetness, so the base should taste slightly bolder than you want the final scoop to be.

Über Lemon Ice Cream

Some lemon desserts only hint at citrus. This one does not. The idea is to push lemon as far as a frozen custard will politely allow, using three sources of it at once: the zest for aromatic oils, the juice for sharpness, and a little steeping time so the flavour actually penetrates the base.

Rub the lemon zest into the sugar first so the oils release, then use that lemon sugar to build a custard. Add the juice at the end, off the heat, and taste for balance, because too much acid too early can curdle the dairy or leave the texture grainy. A pinch of salt makes the lemon read louder without adding more acid. The reward is a scoop that tastes like lemon curd that learned to stay cold, bright enough to make you wince in a good way.

Mochi

Mochi is a Japanese rice cake made from glutinous rice, known as mochigome, which is pounded until it becomes a smooth, stretchy, elastic dough. Traditionally this was done in a large mortar with wooden mallets in a rhythmic, two-person process called mochitsuki, though a home cook today is far more likely to steam or microwave sweet rice flour with water and sugar to reach a similar texture.

Once you have the soft dough, dust it generously with cornflour or potato starch to stop it sticking to absolutely everything, then shape it. Daifuku is the classic filled version: a small round of mochi wrapped around a sweet centre, most often sweet red bean paste, though strawberry, custard and ice cream fillings are all popular now.

Drunken Gummy Bears

Strictly 18+. This is an adults-only novelty and nothing more. Gummy sweets are soaked in a spirit until they swell and take on the flavour of whatever they were sitting in. The gelatine absorbs the liquid slowly, so over a day or two in the fridge the little sweets puff up considerably and turn soft and boozy.

The important, sensible point is that the alcohol does not disappear when it is hidden inside a sweet. Because they still taste mostly of fruit, it is very easy to lose track of how much you have had, and they must be kept well away from children. Serve them cold, in small numbers, purely as a curiosity for adults who know exactly what they are eating. There is nothing to be gained by pushing quantities.

Maple Vodka

Strictly 18+. A gentle nod to Evelyne's Canadian kitchen, this is simply a home-infused vodka carrying the flavour of maple. Real maple syrup is stirred through plain vodka until it dissolves, sometimes with a split vanilla pod or a strip of orange peel left to steep for a few days before straining.

Use genuine maple syrup rather than pancake sauce, because the flavour is the entire point. Keep it in a sealed bottle in a cool cupboard. As with anything home-infused, label it clearly with what it is and when you made it, store it out of reach of anyone under 18, and treat it as the strong drink it is. A little poured over ice or into a coffee is plenty.

Bloody Mary Ice Lollies

Strictly 18+. A savoury cocktail turned into a frozen lolly, this takes the familiar tomato, lemon, Worcestershire sauce, celery salt and pepper mixture and freezes it on sticks. It is a genuinely refreshing idea for a warm-weather gathering of adults, tart and savoury rather than sweet.

A practical note on the freezing: alcohol does not freeze at normal freezer temperatures, so a lolly with too much spirit in it will never set. Keep the alcohol to a small proportion of the mixture, or freeze the tomato base solid and add the spirit only in tiny amounts, and they will hold their shape. Season the mix boldly before freezing, since cold flattens flavour. Keep them clearly separate from any non-alcoholic lollies so nobody, least of all a child, picks one up by mistake.

Butsi with Ube Halaya

This last one deserves a little more room, because it sits at the meeting point of two food traditions. Butsi, also spelled buchi, is the Filipino name for a fried glutinous-rice ball rolled in sesame seeds. It is closely related to the Chinese jian dui, the sesame ball found on dim sum trolleys, and arrived in Filipino cooking through centuries of Chinese influence. The two are essentially cousins.

The shell is made from glutinous rice flour worked into a soft dough, wrapped around a sweet filling, rolled in white sesame seeds, and deep fried. As it cooks the dough puffs up and the inside becomes hollow and chewy while the sesame crust turns crisp and nutty. Getting there takes patience: the balls should be fried gently in oil that is not too hot, and turned constantly so they expand evenly without splitting.

The ube halaya filling

Ube halaya is a Filipino jam made from ube, the purple yam, which is quite distinct from ordinary sweet potato despite the frequent confusion. The cooked yam is mashed and cooked down slowly with coconut milk, condensed milk and butter until it thickens into a smooth, glossy, deeply purple spread. It is a beloved dessert in its own right, spooned into glasses at Christmas and used to flavour everything from ice cream to bread rolls.

Tucking a nugget of ube halaya inside the butsi gives you a striking result: a crisp sesame shell, a chewy rice layer, and a soft violet centre that is sweet, faintly nutty and unmistakably its own thing. It takes real care to assemble and fry well, which is precisely why it makes such a satisfying weekend project. If you cannot find fresh ube, frozen grated ube and ube jam are both widely sold in Filipino and wider Asian grocers.