For Sydneysiders, yum cha wouldn’t be the same without a mango pancake for dessert. But this "tradition" may not be as traditional as it seems.

For many, mango pancakes are an essential finale to the yum cha experience. Chopsticks are put down in anticipation of the dessert trolley, of picking up a fridge-cold, plump roll and taking a satisfying bite that bursts through the smooth pancake skin into whipped, sugared cream and a buried chunk of tinned mango.

They are so ubiquitous in Sydney yum cha restaurants that I had no reason to assume they were anything other than traditional, until friends of Australian-Hong Kong background taught me otherwise, screwing up their noses at the lurid yellow-orange rolls.

They are not a traditional Chinese dessert, and they’re not served at yum cha in other parts of the world.

It was Fuchsia Dunlop, chef, writer and Chinese food expert, who first raised the alarm that they may, in fact, be our invention. English-born Fuchsia has eaten, lived and travelled extensively through China for decades, and sampled Chinese food around the world, and the first time she laid eyes on a mango pancake was on a trip to Sydney.

“I was intrigued while in Sydney to find ‘mango pancakes’ an apparent staple of Chinese restaurants there,” she writes on her blog. “I’ve never come across this speciality anywhere in China, even in Hong Kong.”

Though you can find them around the country, mango pancakes seem to be more widely popular in Sydney, according to friends who have relocated from Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne. They all ate egg tarts or mango pudding instead before they got to Sydney.

An internet search for mango pancakes brings up mostly posts from Australian food bloggers, and comments from homesick Aussies around the world.

Yvonne Lee of Sydney blog Vondelicious couldn’t find a single recipe for mango pancakes online as recently as 2010, so she created one.

Yvonne Lee's mango pancakes.

“I first had it in yum cha in Sydney about 10 years ago,” says Yvonne. She didn’t eat mango pancakes growing up – her family are of Hong Kong background, and relatives who came here to visit just five years ago had never heard of them.

“I visit Hong Kong once every year and I don’t think I’ve seen mango pancakes on the menu at any yum cha restaurant, although in recent years they seem to be offered in dessert restaurants and bakeries along with durian pancakes,” she says.

Scroll your way through #mangopancake on social media, and you’ll notice two versions: the rolls we are familiar with, and the square, pillow-like versions found in Hong Kong dessert shops.

Some sources credit Hong Kong chain Honeymoon Dessert with inventing the mango pancake, and indeed they are responsible for that otherwise identical square version, now made famous throughout China and other parts of the world. But Honeymoon Dessert didn’t open its first store until 1995.

Connie Chung, group manager of Sydney’s 34-year-old Marigold Restaurant says mango pancakes were being made in Sydney before that. “We started serving mango pancakes from around 1991–1992”.

“Back then, mango pudding was a very popular dessert and the chef decided to make another mango dessert and came up with this,” she says.

Connie can’t be certain where the idea for the recipe first came from, because the chefs who began making them in the early 90s have since retired, but it’s not a traditional recipe.

“Traditional Chinese desserts are not as sweet compared to Western ones,” she says. “Most older Chinese find the cream inside the pancake too sweet for their palate.” Chilled desserts aren’t common either – Chinese desserts tend to be hot.

“They are more popular with Westerners or the younger generations of Chinese and Asians,” she says. “The pancakes could be an adaption for the Australian palate.”

Connie has watched as mango desserts have become popular in Hong Kong specialty dessert shops over the past decade, but notes that mango parfait, mango sago soup and mango pudding are still much more common there than the pancake.

It seems quite possible that the mango pancake travelled from Sydney to Hong Kong, and not the other way around.

The mystery remains though, so we’re opening it to you: when and where did you first lay eyes on a mango pancake?