Vegan Dessert in Vietnam

Strange as it may seem for people who love vegan cake as much as we do here at the Vegan Food Quest, we haven’t managed to find that many things that would be our ‘go to’ vegan dessert in Vietnam, but not wanting to disappoint we have searched out a few sweet treats that would hit the spot for a sweet-toothed travelling vegan.

Fruit is often eaten after a meal here and which is not normally our first choice for dessert. However, because the fruit here in Vietnam is really rather lovely, we’re really happy to polish off a fruit plate here.

Fruit Art makes a lovely vegan dessert in Vietnam

Some of you may have heard of the term ‘Banana Pancake Trail’ which basically refers to the well trodden path that backpackers take around South East Asia. The name comes from the fact that banana pancakes are standard traveller fare no matter which country you are in, or whether the native population would ever eat such a thing.

Despite having passed through several of the destinations on the trail since the Vegan Food Quest began, we’ve not eaten one single banana pancake (because they are never vegan). However, in Hoi An, we found a vegan restaurant serving western food and lo and behold, their menu had a vegan banana pancake on it.

Here they are, our first vegan banana pancakes of the Vegan Food Quest

The streets of Hoi An Old Town are lined with little carts selling non-vegan banana fritter type things and our banana pancakes really resembled these. They were a cross between a fritter and a heavy, doughy cake; maybe best described as a fried banana cake?

The saving grace was the fresh ginger syrup that came with our banana pancakes / fried banana cakes but believe us when we say that never before has a dessert been in such need of a scoop or two of vegan ice cream, we still managed to eat them all though.

We have had much success finding vegan street food and so this was one of the places we looked to try to find a vegan dessert in Vietnam. We weren’t disappointed and managed to come across these yummy little sweet cakes made from sweet potato, coconut and green bean.

They tasted sweet and a bit savoury with a dryish texture (from the sweet potato)

Cause for celebration on several counts:

1. We found another delicious vegan street food.
2. We found a vegan dessert in Vietnam.
3. We found a vegan dessert that contains vegetables (which is strangely satisfying to us).
4. These sweet cakes were cooked on a little mini BBQ.

So that’s street food, vegan dessert, vegetable consumption and a BBQ all in one hit.

BBQ for dessert?

Green beans for dessert must be a thing here in Vietnam because our very lovely homestay host (Jolie of Jolie’s Homestay) gave us the most amazing little sweets called ‘green bean cakes’ which were a speciality of Hai Duong.

Not only did they have very cool packaging which meant we had to undertake a Russian Doll-like exercise in order to eat them, but they tasted amazing, like little melt-in-the-mouth sweet morsels of delightfulness. Smooth and vanillary they had the texture of a very fine milled gram flour that has been laced with powdery icing sugar.

Needless to say we can’t get enough of them and have had to enforce rationing to make the box last.

Inside lies a very lovely vegan treat…

The first layer of wrapping…

Remove a cellophane wrapper and you’re left with this little gold parcel…

Six teeny-tiny cubes of bean cake bliss

Mmmmm…. (this is what bean cake bliss looks like)

Tomorrow we’re back to the savoury stuff…

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