01Bubur injin: black rice pudding
Perhaps Bali's best-known dessert, black rice pudding is cooked slowly with coconut milk and palm sugar until thick and fragrant, typically served warm — a genuinely distinctive texture and flavour from Western rice pudding, and a good introduction if you're new to Indonesian desserts.
02Pisang goreng & other fried sweets
Fried banana fritters are a genuinely ubiquitous street snack, alongside various other fried sweet treats made from cassava, sweet potato or rice flour — cheap, widely available at warungs and street stalls across the island.
03Ceremonial & palm sugar sweets
A range of traditional sweets built around palm sugar (gula aren) and rice flour appear specifically around ceremonies and festivals, tying into the broader ceremonial food traditions covered in our rice & ceremony guide — worth trying if you encounter them at a market or celebration rather than seeking them out specifically as a tourist.
04Where modern cafe culture meets traditional dessert
Some of Canggu and Ubud's newer cafes have started incorporating traditional Balinese dessert flavours — black rice, palm sugar, coconut — into more Western dessert formats, a genuinely interesting fusion worth seeking out if you enjoy seeing two food cultures blend.
05Practical tips
Night markets (see our night markets guide) are one of the best places to find a genuine spread of traditional desserts in one place, at prices well below what a cafe would charge for a similar item.