Hong Kong style cafés don't actually serve that much coffee. Instead, they serve copious amounts of their quintessential Hong Kong style milk tea. As the saying goes, when the colonizers give you tea, make milk tea.

So what's a Ying Yang, you might ask? Put the dirty jokes away, please. We'll get to this later.

Ingredients

• 3 teabags -- Yes, this is for ONE milk tea. I'm using earl grey, but it can also be made with English breakfast or orange pekoe, or whatever English (i.e. stolen! ;P) black tea that tickles your fancy.
• 2 tbsp evaporated milk -- In Chinese, it's known as "flower milk" because the most popular brand of evaporated milk was always and still is Carnation brand. I wonder why? Oh yeah, colonizers!
• 2 tsp sugar -- Some people don't sugar their tea, but to be authentic, this needs to be sweet.

Method

• Fill your target glass with water and pour this amount into a small pot.
• Throw the teabags into the pot and bring it to a boil.
• Once boiling, turn it down to a simmer and cover it for 3 minutes.

• Pour evaporated milk into glass and add sugar.
• Pour tea into glass and stir.

You can also drink this cold by adding ice or refrigerating it. Cafés usually charge an extra dollar for a cold milk tea, especially if they have a refrigerator that runs on kerosene. I guess kerosene refrigerators aren't a thing anymore but my grandparents had one -- one of the few refrigerators in the village at the time -- in their café .

Ok fine, I'll explain what a Yin Yang is. Instead of filling the whole glass with tea, you fill it half way and fill the other half with strong coffee. That's a Yin Yang. Makes sense, right? It might sound weird, but people love it, including me. And it's the real reason the Yanks and the Redcoats get along now -- at least more than before. #revisionist-history

But even that's only half the story of Yin Yangs (see what I did there?). My grandma, who was taking the orders from customers, would get a series of requests like this:

• milk tea, hot, less sugar, more milk
• yin yang, cold, 50% tea 50% coffee, lots of milk, normal sugar
• yin yang, hot, 70% tea 30% coffee, normal milk, no sugar
• milk tea, cold, lots of sugar
• yin yang, cold, 90% tea 30% coffee (not everyone in the village was educated, or maybe they were trying to get more), less milk, more sugar

Since I'm Chinese and good at math (ha!), and assuming tea/coffee ratios only go in 10% increments and milk and sugar amounts can be "none", "less", "normal" or "more", that's 288 combinations! And that's just 2 of the drinks! What about the food orders? And let's not even go into the sandwich combinations. But my grandma is one of these legendary people who can always remember it all. She and my grandpa ran the place with just the 2 of them, working 12 hour days with only 1 day off during the year (Chinese New Year) and raising 4 children at the same time -- how did they have time to make them in the first place?! -- so there definitely was no time to "write things down".

There was also ironically barely enough time for them to eat, and doubly ironic that because of this my grandma went through a period when she got fat. One of her regular customers pointed out to her that she had drank 13 milk teas during the day. They're filling and quicker to consume than eating, but that's a lot of milk and sugar!

I hope you enjoy your milk tea at a more leisurely pace, perhaps with a "wife cake". If you're now trying to somehow link "wife cake" with Yin Yang, stop it! I'll explain. Traditionally, the groom's family will send the bride's family a bunch of "wife cakes" to be distributed amongst her relatives. It's important to send a sufficient number and from a good -- even better, famous -- bakery, because the groom's relationship with the bride's family depends on it. If he cheaps out, he'll be forever remembered for that.

Wife cakes are filled with sweetened winter melon. Winter melon is also used to make candied winter melon, a sweet often eaten at Chinese New Year. Winter melon soup is also popular. If you've seen those big green ornately carved melons in a Chinese restaurant, that's winter melon soup being served inside a winter melon.

Maybe I'm exaggerating and it was more important in ye olden days. Nowadays, since not many people have a porter/servant/slave to carry 50kg of wife cakes to the bride's family, gift cards are passed out instead. Less epic, but more practical.

Also nowadays, the idea of wife cakes might be considered a tad sexist, but that doesn't stop me from adopting "wife cakes" as a pet name for my partner. I kid! I kid! I can't even type that with a straight face...