After the success of our vegan mango pancakes, we have another delicious Hong Kong-style crepe recipe for you: blue pancakes with durian cream filling. They’re so pretty, pillowy, and full of flavour — and fully vegan too!
Stuffed pancakes are a beloved dessert across Southeast Asia. They’re shaped like pillows or rolls and consist of an egg crepe wrapped around a sweet, creamy, and fruity filling.
The crepe wrapping can come in a variety of colours, like yellow, pink, green or blue, while the filling is usually a mix of whipped cream and mashed or diced fruit.
Mango is the signature filling in the famous Hong Kong-style pancakes, while creamy durian stuffing is one of the most popular in the Indonesian version.
In this recipe, we’ll show you not just how to prepare durian pancakes from scratch, but also how to make them egg-free, dairy-free, and low-sugar — perfect for everyone to enjoy!
As for the crepe, we used silken tofu instead of eggs and coconut milk instead of dairy milk and butter. Then, we tipped in a little starch to help bind the pancake batter, plus butterfly pea flowers powder to make it look blue.
Butterfly pea flowers are widely used in Thai and Malay desserts to give a wonderful blue hue to cakes, blue sticky rice, and sweets.
You can find powdered butterfly pea flowers at your local Asian food store or online — often under the name of “blue matcha”, as they taste earthy and grassy like matcha but not as bitter.
The blue pea powder is optional, so feel free to skip it. Alternatively, you can use pandan leaf extract or matcha powder to make the crepes green, taro or ube extract for purple, or turmeric for yellow (as we did in our mango pancake recipe).
As for the durian stuffing, we recommend you buy the ripest fruit segments. Ripe durian will be much creamier, easy to blend and perfect for making a silky crepe filling.
Ripe durians will also be tastier, so you’ll savour more the intensely aromatic flavour of this unique tropical fruit.
What do durians taste like? For us, durians taste like ripe bananas and almonds mixed with cream cheese and chives. They are a bit of an acquired taste — I admit — but they grew on us!
In fact, we like durians so much that we used them in two other delicious recipes: durian oat cookies and durian tofu cheesecake. So give them a go if you have any leftovers from this durian pancake recipe!