Five dessert ideas below, each one built to sit in a container for a few hours without going soft, sticky-in-the-wrong-way, or messy to eat with your hands. Dates do most of the work in all of them — they don't need refrigeration and they sweeten the mix without a separate bag of sugar.
Date and pandan coconut bites
Ingredients: pitted dates, desiccated coconut, a few drops of pandan extract.
Blend the dates to a paste, fold through the coconut and pandan, roll into small balls and coat in extra coconut. The pandan gives it a flavour that's different from the usual plain date ball, and the coconut coating keeps the outside dry to the touch.
Mini date tarts
Ingredients: shortcrust pastry cases (store-bought is fine), date paste, chopped pistachio.
Spoon date paste into small pre-baked pastry cases and top with chopped pistachio. Make these the morning of the picnic — the pastry stays crisp for a few hours but softens if it sits overnight with the filling in.
Date and peanut skewers
Ingredients: pitted dates, peanut butter, crushed peanuts.
Fill each date with a small amount of peanut butter, press the opening closed, roll the edge in crushed peanuts, and thread three or four onto a short skewer. Easy to eat standing up, no plate needed.
Iced date and yoghurt drink
Ingredients: pitted dates, plain yoghurt, milk, ice.
Blend dates with yoghurt and milk until smooth, pour into a flask with ice just before leaving the house. It's the one item here that needs to be kept cold rather than left out, but it travels well in an insulated bottle for a couple of hours.
Date rice paper rolls
Ingredients: rice paper wrappers, chopped dates, shredded coconut, mint leaves.
Soften a rice paper wrapper in water, lay in chopped dates, coconut and a mint leaf, and roll tightly. Slightly unusual as a "dessert" but it works as a sweet finger-food that doesn't need a fork, and it holds its shape better than you'd expect if wrapped snugly.
Whichever of these you make, start with dates that are soft enough to blend without extra water — dry dates need more liquid to break down and the result turns thinner than it should. Have a look through our dates selection or the buah kurma range for stock that's suited to this kind of use.