Sticky situation: London's messiest puddings, from lava buns to Angel Delight tacos

At DIN Tai Fung they call it “golden sand”. I call it messy. Still, that’s part of the fun of it — “it” being the Covent Garden dumpling restaurant’s new cult dessert, the aptly-named “lava bun”.

The signature pud landed on menus in London last month after huge hype — it’s one of the best-selling desserts at most of the Taiwanese restaurant’s 161 global outposts — and it’s a cinematic sensation. An innocent steamed bun to the untrained eye, sink your teeth into the white dough and you won’t find crispy duck or slow-cooked pork but a hot-flowing deluge of yellow salted egg custard. Get the napkins ready.

“The traditional way to eat it is to break the soft bun apart with the thumb, allowing the egg custard to drip onto a spoon,” director Xue Feng Bai tells me as thick, gooey custard oozes onto my plate and — much to the amusement of onlooking diners — all over my hands.

“You eat one half of the bun, sip the custard from the spoon, then relish the second and final half of the dessert.”

Too late for me, it seems, but I’m not the only one. Instagram is flooded with tagged posts of Londoners getting their hands dirty. “Absolute filth, in the best kind of way,” writes one. “I can’t stop thinking about them,” gushes another.

Chefs train for six months before they’re allowed to work in the restaurant and each bun is so complex to make that when Bai and his team launched them, there were only 200 available each day, and only from Friday to Sunday.

But even for a restaurant that boasted four-hour queues when it opened, Bai says demand for his lava buns “surpassed expectations”. Now the gooey golden nuggets are available every day of the week and orders are unlimited, so you can go all-out.

Opt for a basket of three if you dare — or mix it up: Din Tai Fung’s red bean and chocolate xiao long bao is equally messy. “It comes with red bean curd with layered chocolate, all inside the delicate casing of the xiao bao,” says Kate Mendez, Din Tai Fung’s press supremo. “You eat it with chopsticks — but the chocolate goes everywhere.” I’m glad I wore black.

At China Town's Bun House down the road, staff now warn guests about their custard buns after one customer sent them her dry cleaning bill following a particularly messy encounter (generously, they paid it). That hasn’t stopped the queues: custard buns have been on the restaurant’s menu since the start and remain one of its top-selling items.

“People love to see the squirting custard in action,” says co-founder Z He, who brought the buns to London after seeing their popularity in China. “All over Instagram we see our custard buns being ripped open in the most dramatic way.”

Indeed, there’s something entrancing about shots of sweet, sticky goodness oozing all over your feed. Ice cream sandwich connoisseur Happy Endings draws crowds to its 22 London outposts thanks to its steady stream of “filthy” food-porn posts — think ice cream layered up like a BLT and salted caramel parfait wedged between layers of chocolate Guinness cake — and Chin Chin Labs makes a killing with its impossibly messy dessert collection on Instagram. The headline act is a hot ice cream sandwich nicknamed the Warmie which — needless to say — is a race against the clock.

Flesh & Buns, in Covent Garden, has its own hot take on the Warmie: a marshmallow sandwich called the S’more. The gooey dessert is a favourite, featuring marshmallow “lollipops” that customers toast over a fire at the table, before wedging between biscuits and green tea-flavoured white chocolate. Prepare for sticky fingers, or you’re not trying hard enough.

Pastry chefs are getting stuck in, too. Kerridge’s Bar & Grill near Embankment serves a giant chestnut profiterole with hot-flowing salted coffee caramel poured over the top, while Maître Choux’s bakeries in Soho and Kensington do a roaring trade in their satsuma-sized choux buns bursting with vanilla, caramel and blueberry cheesecake. Co-founder Jeremie Vaislic encourages eating them with your hands, like a doughnut.

Elsewhere across the capital, restaurants are losing the airs and graces. Club Mexicana, at Homerton’s The Spread Eagle, serves a sweet taco stack filled with angel delight that’s notoriously tricky to eat while Soho’s famously decadent Bob Bob Ricard has a chocolate glory orb which melts before your eyes as hot chocolate sauce is poured over it. Naturally, it’s the most-ordered dessert. Get stuck in.