Jujubes Meet Sticky Toffee Pudding in This Obsession-Worthy Win Son Bakery Recipe

On one of her last days traveling in Taiwan with fellow Win Son Bakery team members about a year prior to the bakery’s opening, pastry chef Danielle Spencer visited a Chinese medicine shop in Tainan. It was the shop that Win Son’s co-owner Josh Ku and his family had been going to for years.

“Josh’s mom pointed to the red dates and was like, ‘These are good.’ So I bought a ton of bags and half my luggage was red dates and goji berries,” says Spencer, admitting that having too much Taiwan currency to use up may have prodded her toward the bulk purchase.

Once she was back at her home base in Brooklyn, Spencer began scheming the mochi donuts, milk bread, and other baked goods inspired by Taiwan’s breakfast-food classics that would define Win Son Bakery.

The bakery, located in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg, is currently open for takeout and delivery only. They closed completely for a few weeks at the beginning of the stay-at-home order that shut down New York restaurants to dine-in customers. But now they’re as busy as ever offering locals the scallion-pancake breakfast sandwiches and fan tuan rice rolls that made Win Son Bakery one of New York City’s buzziest restaurants of the last year. Those salivating over their American-diner-meets-Taiwanese-breakfast-stand classics on Instagram from afar might find solace in experimenting with scallion pancakes at home.

And those red dates from the Tainan pharmacy? These sweet, earthy, fudgy dried fruits made it into one of the most delightful pastries at the bakery, a plump red date cake. There was one other source of its inspiration: Sticky toffee pudding.

The red date cake at Win Son Bakery is a true Taiwanese American innovation, deliciously melding a classic Taiwanese ingredient (also used across much of East Asia) with a classic, British-born dessert (which is also widely enjoyed in America). At the bakery, it’s a perfectly pop-able single serving-sized treat drenched in toffee sauce. (We've adapted the recipe to work in a standard cake pan.) You might not notice all the red dates that were cooked into the batter, but the usage of dates in traditional sticky toffee pudding recipes predates this iteration.

Chinese red dates, also known as jujubes, are an essential component of traditional Chinese medicine. Often used dried, these wrinkly, red dates are less sticky than brown Medjool dates, but have a similar round, fruity flavor. In East Asian cuisines, they’re often prepared as a simple infusion or as a component of teas such as ba bao cha (eight treasure tea), or dropped into chicken soups and stews. According to the Five Elements theory of traditional Chinese medicine, they can benefit the stomach and spleen. But they’re associated with a vast number of benefits.

“They’re protein-rich, contain Vitamin C and B and trace minerals, and they have a multiplicity of benefits, [such as in] red date and honey tea for insomnia, anxiety, and increased energy,” says Ellasara King, a teacher at Traditional Chinese Medicine World Foundation. “I eat them in my oatmeal with banana for clear skin.”

These red dates are also enjoyed simply for their culinary attributes, too.

“I remember eating them as a seasonal and festive dried fruit,” says Katy Hui-Wen Hung, a history blogger and co-author of The Culinary History of Taipei. In recent years, however, she has seen them featured in more interesting ways in food, including powdered and added to dried noodle batter in Taiwan’s Miaoli County. That region is home to Taiwan’s red date or jujube-growing industry, and there is even a red date festival in Gongguan, Miaoli, every late summer. There, you can find red dates flavoring desserts like ice cream and popsicles. And during harvest season, fresh jujubes from the orchard are coveted.

There is one important note about handling dried, pitted red dates: sometimes, they aren’t actually pitted. Spencer estimates that somewhere around one out of 10 dates she receives have their whole middles intact. This means that before she can cook and pulverize them to add to her batter, each one must be sliced through to ensure that it’s pitless. Picking through the dried dates became a team effort at Win Son Bakery.

“Someone said it was like a meditative process,” says Spencer. “It’s nice that everyone pitches in.”

Once pitted, the chopped dates simmer with water and baking soda to soften before they’re added to the cake’s creamed-butter base. You’ll whip up a simple toffee glaze while the cake bakes, then drizzle it on top before serving.

When Spencer first moved to New York City, she wound up in an apartment in the heart of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park Chinatown. Due to her neighborhood’s restaurant offerings, Chinese bakery staples like pork floss-filled bao quickly became her bacon-egg-and-cheese. Win Son Bakery’s breakfast menu combines influences from the typical New York deli breakfast experience with the typical Chinese or Taiwanese bakery menu in ways that the city has seldom seen before.

While by no means attempting to create a health food, Spencer was encouraged to use the dates in something for the menu because of their medicinal value, too.

“It’s one of those things that’s not really done much,” she says, of using red dates in pastry. “I just felt like, oh, if my date cake makes everyone feel better, then that’s good.”

Win Son Bakery's Red Date Cake

Win Son Bakery, Brooklyn

Originally Appeared on Epicurious