IN his book “Stressed Spelled Backwards Is Desserts,” author Brian Luke Seaward remembered the homespun philosophy of his grandmother as she handed him a plate of freshly baked cookies.

It’s a comforting thought to justify the guilty pleasures of sinking your teeth into a piece of chocolate cake. But does giving up desserts in the name of healthy eating have to be an invitation to anxiety?

There are so many occasions and reasons for one to indulge a sweet tooth. Hot summer days turn one’s thoughts to ice cream. Chilly winter days conjure up visions of chocolate lava cake. Bad-mood days demand a strawberry cheesecake to lighten ease the nerves.

Most desserts in both Western and Chinese cuisines are steeped in eggs, sugar and butter — loaded with calories and cholesterol.

But a dessert doesn’t have to be unhealthy to satisfy a sweet tooth. There are worry-free, low-fat Chinese desserts made with ingredients beneficial to health, like beans, root vegetables, nuts and even tofu.

In Shanghai, there are many restaurants specializing in healthy Chinese desserts, from large chains like Honeymoon Dessert and Meet Fresh to small independent vendors.

Their menus include a wide range of soups, puddings and cakes.

Custards, puddings and jellies

Three classic tang shui dishes made with fresh milk are actually more like custards than soups.

Shuang pi nai, or double-skin milk, is a sweet custard originating in Shunde, Guangdong Province. The smooth milk custard uses fresh buffalo milk, which is first steamed with plastic wrap covering the bowl for 10 minutes. The bowl of milk is then allowed cool down until a skin forms on top. A small knife is used to lift the edge of the skin and allow the milk to be carefully poured out into another container. Lightly beaten egg white is then folded in, and the mixture is poured back into the original container, underneath the skin. Steam for an additional 12 minutes. The dish can be served hot or cold, but the texture is the best when it’s at around 40-50 degrees Celsius.

Ginger milk curd is a hot dessert popular in winter. To make it, finely grind mature ginger and squeeze out the juice with muslin. Then add 10ml of the ginger juice to each bowl. Boil cow or buffalo milk sweetened with sugar, and let the milk cool to about 70 degrees Celsius. Pour the milk quickly into the ginger juice. The mixture will curdle in a few minutes.

Fresh egg-milk custard is also easy to make. The egg and milk mixture is steamed until a custard forms. Honey, nuts and fresh fruits can be added as toppings.

For tea lovers, different varieties of green, black or floral blend teas can be used to make jellies by adding gelatin. The tea beverage shop Icha in Xintiandi offers a tea jelly platter made with rose, oolong, chrysanthemum and other teas. Cooked oats are added to the jelly to enrich the texture.

Gui ling gao, or turtle shell jelly, is a medicinal dessert commonly eaten in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. Traditionally, the black-colored jelly was made with golden coin turtle shell, but today it’s an herbal jelly made from a powder mix. The dessert is popular in summer to reduce the heat.

Bing fen is a summertime dessert in Sichuan and Guizhou provinces. It also an herbal jelly, made from the nicandra plant, or apple of Peru. The dessert can be easily made with instant bing fen mix. The jelly is served in a brown sugar syrup with added raisins, nuts and sesame seed.

Almond tofu is a jelly dessert originated from Beijing. It’s made from apricot kernels and has no soybean content. The reference to tofu comes from its texture. Apricot kernels are soaked in water and then ground up to extract the “milk” of the pit. It is sweetened and heated with agar. The soft jelly is formed when chilled. Almond tofu can be served on its own or with additional toppings like fruits or osmanthus-flavored honey. Some recipes mix milk with the kernel milk. There are also instant mix packs available in supermarkets.

Another dessert from the capital is old Beijing “cheese,” which is actually a half-coagulated smooth pudding made with milk and rice wine. Fresh milk is first boiled and then cooled to room temperature. The milk skin is removed and the milk is combined with filtered rice wine. The mixture is placed in a bowl covered with plastic wrap perforated with a few holes to allow water from the mixture to evaporate. The mixture is steamed for 40 minutes and then chilled.

Some restaurants choose to give Western-style puddings a Chinese twist, replacing the chocolate or vanilla flavor with black sesame seeds, oats or soymilk.

Sweet soups

In Cantonese cuisine, dessert soups are called tang shui, or tong sui, which translate as “sugar water.” These desserts are especially popular in summer to relieve heat. In general, the Chaozhou style tang shui is sweeter than the Guangzhou style.

Classic tang shui includes soups made with beans, sweet potato, taro, nuts, cream or milk and fruits.

The most common sweet potato soup is a simple and cheap dessert made from yellow-flesh sweet potatoes, ginger and golden slab sugar (a type of brown sugar) or rock sugar. For every kilo of sweet potato, about 20 grams of ginger are added for extra nutrients and flavor.

Simple stews come in many combinations — traditional recipes like papaya with white fungus, taro and sweet potato, water chestnut with pear and white fungus, and even dried bean curd sheet with egg drops. The two essential tips in making these tang shui are to add ginger and use rock sugar or brown sugar instead of granulated sugar. Some recipes add a poached egg to make sweet soups more filling.

Almost every Chinese household indulges in mung bean soup in the summertime, using beans alone or additional ingredients like Job’s-tears. One tang shui dish, kelp and mung bean soup, is flavored with dried orange peel and rock sugar.

Sesame seeds and walnuts or a combination of both are used to cook thicker, paste-like soups that are sweeter and higher in calories. Sometimes sweet tang yuan (rice dumplings) are added.

Cream or milk-based dessert soups are sweeter and fruitier. One of the most notable is mango pomelo sago, a Hong Kong dessert created in 1984. Cooked pearl sago, fresh mango and pomelo flesh are added to coconut milk mixed with mango puree. The sweet and sour dessert is served chilled. Some recipes mix the coconut milk with cream or evaporated milk for a richer taste, but that does make the dessert less healthy.

You can easily make similar desserts in the home kitchen by adding your favorite fruits and cooked pearl sago in milk or coconut milk.