28 Delicious Vietnamese Dessert Recipes

Che Chuoi recipe is a dessert soup made with sugar-sweetened coconut milk, chunks of banana, and small tapioca pearls.

The banana soaks up the coconut milk, will dispersing its sweetness throughout the “broth.”

Chewy tapioca balls and chopped peanuts add a fun textural contrast. 

This bright green dessert is another type of dessert soup featuring pandan jelly worms swimming in a cold coconut broth.

Pandan paste is the flavoring and coloring agent for these scratch-made jello strips. Pandan is Vietnam’s answer to vanilla, but it’s grass instead of a bean.

Pandan has a sweet vanilla and coconut flavor that combines with mung bean starch to create these tasty, bright green jello worms.

Before Vietnam gained independence, it was a French colony.

You can see lingering French influences in Vietnamese cuisine, the most famous of which is the Banh Mi baguette. 

Banh Kep La Dua is another French-inspired dessert waffle made with wheat and tapioca flour, sugar, and coconut.

The bright green pandan powder creates a green and tan marbled waffle that tastes even better than the plain Belgian waffles I’m used to.

Taro is a Southeast Asian root vegetable that has bright purple innards and tastes like a sweet potato.

Like sweet potato, taro is a versatile ingredient used in sweet and savory dishes. 

This taro pudding places chunks of taro over slow-cooked glutinous rice, topping the porridge-like dish with a super creamy coconut sauce. 

Avocados are another versatile ingredient that adds richness and creaminess to any dish.

While we may be used to salty or tangy avocado dishes a la Mexico, this classic Vietnamese smoothie shows how good avocados taste in desserts.

This is a simple three-ingredient recipe that blends avocados, sweetened condensed milk, and regular milk with ice for the creamiest smoothie ever!

Perhaps the most well-known and beloved Vietnamese drink, Vietnamese coffee is as much a dessert as it is a caffeine boost.

Combining dark roast coffee with sweetened condensed milk, Vietnamese coffee is both intensely rich and intensely sweet.

You make it with a special pour-over-coffee filter, with a ratio of two parts coffee to one-part condensed milk. 

Fried dough is a beloved delicacy in nearly every culture around the globe, with types of donuts in every culture.

Vietnamese donuts are light and airy, like beignets, but they are hollow and dipped in sesame seeds. This recipe is vegan, using almond milk as the wet ingredient.

I love the nutty finish of the sesame seeds.

When visiting foreign tropical countries, exploring their fruit and vegetable markets full of exotic produce can be just as fun as any other attraction.

This Vietnamese Fruit Cocktail is a great way to taste some of Vietnam’s most delicious fruits, like lychee, longan, and jackfruit.

Plus, this recipe features homemade chewy jellies for a chewy candy surprise!

Check out other Asian fruits you need to try.

This Vietnamese bundt cake gets its name due to the honeycombed air bubbles that form as the cake bakes.

The batter is a simple blend of tapioca starch, eggs, sugar, pandan extract, and coconut milk, which creates a moist, spongey, and bright green cake.

Vietnam may be thousands of miles from Ireland, but this cake would be the perfect St. Patrick’s Day centerpiece!

Mooncakes are a traditional dessert to celebrate the lunar new year in most Asian countries.

However, this creative, summery take on the classic uses the same gorgeous cake molds, filling them with green tea and taro-flavored jello instead of batter.

Additionally, the jello preparation uses coconut milk as well as sugar and water for a creamier finish.

A popular dessert in Vietnam and Thailand, milkshakes are an easy one-blender dessert that you can customize with your favorite fruits or sweet flavors.

While we’re used to milkshakes being a blend of ice cream and milk, Vietnamese milkshakes swap ice cream for sweetened condensed milk.

This recipe calls for a helping of fresh fruit like mango or strawberry. I like to add frozen mangos instead of ice to create a more ice-cream-like texture.

Named for the shape and not the ingredients, Vietnamese Pig Ear biscuits are the quintessential childhood snack.

They are pig-ear-shaped cookies molded with a swirl of light and dark dough. Instead of baking these cookies, you deep fry them to a thin, sugary crisp.

The white dough is reminiscent of a sugar cookie, while the dark dough is enriched with coconut and sesame seeds. 

These are different from my usual kinds of cookies, and they're a welcome change!

Traditionally a Vietnamese New Year dish, Vietnamese rice balls are an acquired taste for foreign palates.

Glutenous rice has a gooey, almost jello-like texture, forming in the outer layer of these rice balls.

They’re filled with a mung bean paste, which is also a novel flavor and texture, as we don’t usually eat beans for dessert.

This light and fluffy sponge cake is more like a vanilla souffle and is another example of French colonial legacy.

You even use a water-bath method for oven baking it, steaming it until it puffs up to twice the size of the original batter. 

This recipe uses five eggs, separating the yolks from the whites and mixing the whipped whites into the batter to achieve the fluffy, souffle-like texture. 

While you might associate sticky rice with Thailand, Vietnam has a unique version of its own.

Vietnamese sticky rice has the same glutinous rice base, but the difference lies in the toppings. Sticky rice is most popular as a savory accompaniment, served with sausage, eggs, spices, and herbs.

However, some of the most popular street food is sticky rice stewed in coconut milk and topped with large-grain sugar, shredded coconut, and peanuts.

Corn is a summer treat in the US as well as Vietnam, and this dessert is the best way to showcase the yellow sweet corn harvest.

It’s essentially a hybrid of sticky rice and creamed corn. The creamed corn is brothier than the typical canned version, creating another dessert soup with chunky rice and a creamy coconut sauce.

Vietnamese Three Color Dessert is the Vietnamese version of a British trifle, consisting of different dessert layers stacked in a transparent bowl, revealing its multi-colored custards, jellies, and syrups. 

The layers that create the three colors are green pandan jelly, sweet bean paste, mung beans, and thickened coconut milk.

Unlike Trifle, this dessert is served in individual glasses, and you end up swirling all of the ingredients together. 

This unique Vietnamese yogurt recipe combines cultured, plain yogurt with condensed milk and whole milk, more fitting of a dessert than a healthy breakfast food.

Vietnamese yogurt also uses the vegan thickening agent known as agar-agar to create a firm, almost gelatinous texture.

The plain yogurt provides a nice tangy finish!

Another bright green pandan-infused dessert, Banh da Lon features various layers of bright green pandan tapioca and rice batter interspersed with layers of creamy coconut milk mung bean cream.

This is a tedious recipe because you have to steam each layer until it solidifies into a firm gelatinous texture before placing the next layer on top and returning the cake to the steamer.

Yet another dessert soup, Suong Sao Hat E, is one of the most exotic dishes on my list, featuring ingredients that I had never heard of, let alone tasted.

Grass jelly comes from a Vietnamese plant, resulting in jet-black gelatin cut into thick squares. 

Clove basil is an African basil seed that puffs up and turns translucent when combined with liquid, kind of like Chia seeds. 

One of the few warm desserts in Vietnam, this delicate tofu pudding is a labor of love, combining silken tofu with fresh soy milk to create thin, melt-in-your-mouth layers of custard drowned in rich ginger syrup.

The syrup is an easy, simple syrup made by boiling white and brown sugar with fresh ginger.

These golden fried rice balls coated in sesame seeds offer the perfect balance of crispy and chewy.

They consist of glutinous rice stuffed with mung bean paste. 

The rice flour crisps up perfectly when fried, getting an extra crunch from the toasted sesame seeds.

The chewy, pillowy mung bean paste is the perfect textural contrast.

Cassava is a root vegetable that you might also know as yuca.

It tastes like a potato, with a more fibrous texture. It’s also responsible for the unparalleled density of this traditional Vietnamese Coconut Cassava cake.

You’ll only want a small square of this chewy, sticky coconut cake due to its density and richness.

If you like banana bread, this recipe is a chewier, denser, tropical version.

Instead of wheat flour, this recipe uses a blend of tapioca and rice flour.

The ripe bananas, brown sugar, and cinnamon are reminiscent of banana bread loaves. However, steaming the cake creates a texture more like bread pudding. 

Another French-inspired dessert, flan, is a mainstay in culinary traditions worldwide, from Spain to Mexico to Vietnam.

Vietnamese flan cake takes the classic custard and places it over a chiffon cake foundation.

The classic caramel sauce thus pervades both the silky flan and spongy cake bottom. The silky flan and spongey chiffon cake are both super light and incredibly rich. 

A common street food dessert in the Vietnamese city of Danang, Kem Bo layers mashed avocadoes infused with maple syrup with coconut ice cream, then finishing it off with a creamy coconut, sugar, and cornstarch sauce.

Avocado is the perfect substitute for mousse, as you can whip it into the exact same consistency.

Banana pudding was always a favorite childhood dessert, garnished with nilla wafers and whipped cream.

With the Vietnamese banana pudding, you use a full-fat coconut milk base with sugar and chopped bananas.

Instead of wafers, the pudding gets a unique chew from the bouncy tapioca pears.

This three-ingredient recipe is a popular and easy dessert soup made by boiling mug beans until tender, then stirring in coconut milk and sugar.

Mung beans have a nutty, slightly sweet flavor that pairs perfectly with the nutty, sweet coconut milk.

A sweet bean soup may sound a little strange, but its subtly sweet flavor and mashed bean texture are as comforting of soul food as sweet potato pie.