14 Desserts for Your Lunar New Year Spread

February 17 marks a new lunar year and no feast — be it big or small — is complete without something sweet. Ring in the Year of the Horse with any (or all) of our takes on these Lunar New Year desserts.

A common celebration dish, Ba Bao Fan, also known as "eight treasure rice," belongs on your table. The eye-catching sweet rice is studded with eight different fruits, nuts and seeds. Although the bejeweled dessert is brushed with sugar syrup before serving, it’s not heavily sweet. But you can always whip up some extra sugar syrup on the side to satisfy more insatiable sweet tooths.

Jennifer Yee’s take on the cookies features whole toasted almonds, giving the cookie a bit of contrast. Learn how to bake these cookies step-by-step in Food Network Digital Original series, The Lunar New Year Menu.

Yaksik, also known as yakbap, is a subtly sweet, slightly salty Korean rice cake made with glutinous rice, honey and a variety of nuts and dried fruits. This recipe highlights the mix-ins most commonly found in traditional yaksik, but feel free to customize to your preference with your favorite dried fruits and nuts. Yaksik can be enjoyed in a variety of ways: Scoop it fresh from the pot and serve it right away; spoon it into muffin or cupcake pans for individual portions to eat later; or like this recipe, mold it into a baking dish, then cut it into bars to eat as a snack or dessert.

This soup is based on a common Chinese dessert soup, taro sago, which features delightful little tapioca pearls suspended in a creamy blend of coconut milk and taro (and sometimes sweet potato). Young Sun Huh's version omits the taro but includes two kinds of sweet potatoes — orange and vibrant purple — for a taste and color contrast. Similar to tapioca pudding, this comforting dish can be served warm or cold.

The key to getting the flower-like design on the tops of these chewy, lightly sweetened steamed cakes is a rolling boil. The baking powder, a.k.a. the leavening agent in Andy Liang’s recipe for Food Network Kitchen, works with that high heat to create the fortune cake’s signature cracks.

A popular Lunar New Year gift, Nian Gao is the chewy, bouncy sweet rice flour cake you won't be able to wait to sink your teeth into. Enjoy as is, dipped in condensed milk or pan-fried, for a lightly crispy exterior into a warm, luscious inside.

Golden, crumbly almond cookies are thought to resemble coins, making them particularly popular as a symbol of good fortune during the new year. This recipe from Andy Liang for Food Network Kitchen calls for almond flour, in addition to almond extract, to boost nuttiness, and is topped with blanched almonds.

Bite into tangyuan, or chewy rice balls filled with a sweet, oozy surprise. Traditionally, the warm, silky sweets burst with earthy black sesame paste, but here, we’ve gone with a less typical route — a luscious peanut filling. Add a few drops of food coloring to the dough to make your spread pop.

With a crispy, fried exterior, soft, chewy dough and sweet filling, the fried sesame balls called zin deoi in Cantonese (also spelled “jin deui” and “zeen doy”) are a staple in dim sum restaurants and some Chinese bakeries. The mochi-like dough gets its texture from glutinous rice flour, while adding wheat starch makes it easier to work with and prevents the dough balls from breaking as they expand. You can find fried sesame balls filled with red bean paste, which is traditional, or with peanut butter or chocolate hazelnut spread, which are less so. We filled ours with a traditional lotus paste, made from dried lotus seeds that are soaked and sweetened. The lotus paste has a subtle chestnut and almond flavor that pairs especially well with the coating of nutty sesame seeds on the fried dough.

This deep-fried cookie, soaked in a mixture of jochung (Korean rice syrup) and honey, comes in many shapes, textures and sizes. The most common varieties are pressed in a yakgwa press or mold. Since the specialty press may be hard to find in the US, our version calls for cutting the laminated dough into bite-size squares. With a little bit of patience and planning, you can enjoy these crumbly, pie-like cookies with a side of sikhae, Korean sweet rice punch or herbal tea.

Sweet red bean soup is enjoyed year-round but can also be found at Chinese banquets and, of course, Lunar New Year tables. The simple dessert requires only six ingredients and is a particularly good option for those who prefer their treats not too sweet. Protein-packed dried azuki beans serve as the foundation of this dish, while bits of dried tangerine peel, small tapioca pearls and lump sugar round it out.

Taiwanese pineapple cakes make great gifts anytime, but can also be enjoyed on Lunar New Year. A buttery, tender, shortbread-like dough is wrapped around a sticky, sweet crushed pineapple filling to make for one of the most satisfying treats you’ll sink your teeth into.

Molly says, "Crumbly, shiny almond cookies were a treat that I would get at Chinese restaurants growing up. Usually they were instead of, or in addition to, the classic fortune cookies, and they made that meal extra special. This version has sprinkles because it’s the New Year; they’re kind of like fireworks. And they are ever so slightly softer and chewier in the center than the crumbly ones I grew up with."