@ Rojak (Fruit and Vegetable Salad)

Here’s rojak: a plate of cut-up fruit and other miscellany (sometimes squid! sometimes little fried pieces of dough!) with a bunch of brown-black savory-sweet sauce dumped all over it. This sauce is a mystery to me; all I know is that it has shrimp paste in it. If shrimp paste on top of fruit sounds insane to you, it does to me, too. Here’s the thing, though: IT IS TREMENDOUSLY DELICIOUS.

@ Cendol (Cold Dessert Soup)

You can find chendul/cendol, a sort of cold dessert soup, on Penang Road, a tiny road just large enough for a single car to drive slowly through. Chendul refers to the green Jello-ish squiggles, made from mung-bean flour and stained green with pandan, the leaves of a tropical plant that taste sort of like vanilla. The squiggles, along with red beans, float in a soup of santan, coconut milk, and palm sugar. The soup is ladled over a big lump of ice, and condensed milk goes all over that. It’s served with a spoon but the spoon is unnecessary.

@ Ice Kacang (Corn-Bean Frozen Dessert)

Ice kacang is kind of like a banana split, but in place of bananas there’s corn, kidney beans, and mysterious translucent toothsome jellies. And instead of ice cream there’s shaved ice, topped with a pink syrup that just tastes pink, not in a synesthetic way, but like you’d imagine — like bubble gum. And there’s also, of course, condensed milk all over everything. If you want to gild the kacang, you can add a scoop of ice cream on top of all that.

@ Kuih Kosui (Glutinous Rice and Coconut Dessert)

kosui: inside the banana leaf there’s a layer of pillowy glutinous rice dough wrapped around a filling of furry, shredded coconut stir-fried with brown sugar and pandan.

@ Kuih Dadar

Your tea time snack in Malaysia is not complete if it`s minus the kuih dadar. Kuih dadar, which is also popularly known as kuih tayap, is basically a rolled crepe. The roll is flavored using the pandan juice. The filling can either be grated coconut or Malaysian palm sugar. If you are the kind of person that loves to take sweet snacks alongside their tea, you will find kuih dadar quite delightful.