The Best Hawaiian Desserts — Sweet Endings From a Honolulu Kitchen.
Hawaii kitchen rundown · Desserts
Hawaii dessert is coconut, butter, and tropical fruit. Not over-sugared, not over-styled. Eight recipes from the canon.
8 PICKS · CURATED BY CURTISJ
Hawaii desserts run on three main flavors: coconut, butter, and tropical fruit. Haupia (coconut pudding) is the foundational dessert; everything else is built around it or beside it. The diner-pie genre layered chocolate cream over haupia and lilikoi curd into chiffon. The Portuguese-Hawaiian bakeries gave us malasadas. The Japanese-Hawaiian potluck gave us butter mochi. These flavors have a hundred and twenty years of tradition behind them and they are still the dominant Hawaii dessert vocabulary.
These eight recipes cover the canon — the desserts that close every Hawaii luau, the ones at every potluck, the ones the bakeries on Kapahulu and the North Shore are famous for. Cook three of them and your dessert table starts to read like Hawaii rather than mainland brunch.
The foundation
Haupia – Hawaii’s Silky Coconut Dessert (Just 4 Ingredients)
The coconut-milk pudding cut into squares that closes every luau. Three ingredients, set firm enough to slice, served cold. The dessert every Hawaii family knows by heart.
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The potluck
Butter Mochi – Chewy Hawaiian Coconut Dessert
Mochiko (sweet rice flour), butter, eggs, coconut milk, baked in a 9x13 pan. Chewy, dense, slightly caramelized. At every Hawaii potluck since the 1970s; the easiest Hawaii dessert to bring somewhere.
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The bakery
Malasadas – Hawaii’s Irresistible Portuguese Donuts
The Portuguese-Hawaiian fried-dough ball, rolled in sugar while still hot. Best within fifteen minutes of frying. The Leonard’s Bakery icon, made at home with attention to dough hydration and oil temperature.
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The diner pie
Chocolate Haupia Pie – Hawaii’s Famous Two-Layer Coconut Dessert
The Ted’s Bakery North Shore icon. A chocolate cream layer over a haupia base in a graham crust, both layers cold and silky. The most-photographed Hawaii dessert.
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Diner pie 2
Lilikoi Chiffon Pie: Hawaii's Passion-Fruit Diner Classic
Passion-fruit curd folded into whipped cream, set with gelatin in a graham crust. Bright, tart, mousse-light. The Liliha Bakery and Anna Miller’s standard.
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Diner pie 3
Coconut Cream Pie: The Hawaii Diner Standard
Coconut-milk custard (not heavy cream) in a graham crust, topped with whipped cream and toasted coconut. The Hawaii version is more aggressively coconut than the mainland version because the custard itself is coconut-based.
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Lunar New Year
Gau (Coconut Mochi Cake) – Hawaiian Chinese New Year Dessert
The Chinese-Hawaiian sticky-rice cake (nian gao) eaten at Lunar New Year. Brown sugar, glutinous-rice flour, coconut milk, steamed in a tray. Sliced and pan-fried in butter for serving.
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Frozen
Mochi Ice Cream – Japanese-Hawaiian Frozen Treat
Ice cream wrapped in a thin mochi shell. The Japanese-Hawaiian dessert that mainland supermarkets now sell. The home version uses store-bought ice cream and a mochi-flour wrapper kneaded by hand.
Read the recipe →Cook one of these for the next dinner you host. Hawaii dessert ends a meal in a way mainland sweets do not — lighter, more textured, more obviously seasonal.
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