There seems to have been a little explosion of Japanese dessert houses lately — or maybe it’s just the one chain, Aji-Tei, and I just keep seeing it everywhere.

Not that Japanese desserts are hard to find in Singapore. While some restaurants only offer token matcha or black sesame ice cream flavours, there’s been a healthy stock of individually wrapped Japanese delights on sale in the Ngee Ann City basement for several years now. They don’t come cheap — each sweet costs several dollars and is usually good for only a couple of mouthfuls, assuming you can bear to tear into the pretty packaging and bite into the equally pretty sweet treat at all. But they taste so different from American, European or local desserts that I think it’s worth every bite.

What they serve at dessert houses like Aji-Tei seems to be a little more elaborate. There’s matcha- and black sesame-flavoured options galore, but they’re all served with ice cream, tinned fruit, red bean paste and agar agar cubes. There were also some iced concoctions that reminded me of ice kachang. East meets West, East meets East? A nice change of pace from the usual overly sweet dessert choices at Swensen’s or Haagen-Dazs, anyway.