Traditional East Asian Candy

Originally curated as a Halloween special, this list introduces some traditional East Asian sweets to enjoy with your favorite stories from the region.

Haw Flakes

These sweet, roughly coin-sized disks are made from the Chinese hawberry and packaged in stacks. They have a fruity, slightly tart taste and I would describe the texture as fine sugar packed into a dense patty.

Tanghulu/Candy Calabash

Another hawthorn berry-based treat, tanghulu gets its name from its shape (which resembles the calabash). Haw berries are skewered on bamboo sticks and covered with a hard candy coating. The texture is, unsurprisingly, similar to that of haw flakes (only in a spherical shape).

Golden Plum Candy

A hard candy embedded with a dried and salted plum. While the hard candy tastes like honey, the hard plum has a sour and salty flavor. Do note that there’s usually a pit at the center of the plum.

Peanut Crisp Candy

This candy is made of a sugary peanut filling covered with a crisp candy case.

Sesame Seed Candy

This candy is made of sesame seeds glued together with honey. Sesame seed candy comes in white sesame and black sesame varieties. Often, it comes in a hard block which can be broken into smaller fragments.

While some of these recipes are hundreds of years old, you can find many (if not all) at your local Asian grocery store.