Hello.

I’m writing this after a good weekend. I say it’s good because it was the first one in a while (as you may have noticed in the scarcity of posts these past few weeks) that I had the time to slow down and breathe. And when I say breathe, I mean really take lungsfull of air—the kind that not only sustain, but nourish and revive—where I do breathing best: in the kitchen. I finally had time to cook again, and the clanging of pots, the sizzle of butter in a hot pan, the woodsy smell of thyme as onions caramelize over the stovetop, all the sights and sounds and smells of my cooking…they reminded me of who I am.

And I had needed the reminder for a while. I kind of broke up with my blog a bit these past few months. In Tagalog, “Cool off kami,” an expression that means the amorous fires of affection have been doused with the rains that come with weathering daily life: familiarity, complacency, the humdrumness of it all. As I managed a day job, went home for a quick trip the Philippines, attended three weddings in a span of a month and a half (I was in two of them), worried about Typhoon Ondoy, celebrated anniversaries and birthdays, screamed on roller coaster rides, visited with Wild Things and honed my Cranium skills for game night, I just got SO LOST in the shuffle of my everydays.

It’s not that I had nothing to write about, I had just lost the words. They were hanging out somewhere in a cupboard in my mind, and I didn’t know how to reach them. For a while, I didn’t even really want to. I would read all your blogs, and all the wonderful things you were being and doing in your lives, and I’d grope for the words to describe mine. Who did it matter to, really, all my words? Because somewhere out there, someone else is tackling a Pavlova, or stenciling fabric to sew into a skirt. Someone somewhere always had an idea—often a better idea—and she was writing about it. With beautiful photography to boot.

Two weekends ago, right in the dregs of my Blog Loathingness, I was at my Manang Linda’s house in Las Vegas. Manang Linda is the sort of classic cook who tackles roasts and racks of lamb and steak with a single-minded fearlessness that I’ve always admired. I’m always picking through her cookbooks and, that weekend, realized that she had both volumes of Julia Child’s Mastering The Art Of French Cooking.

I wrinkled my nose, remembering the poetry with which Julie Powell described Child’s signature dish, Boeuf Bourguignon. Don’t get me wrong. I love the book and shamelessly teared up during the movie, but somehow, I didn’t like how EVERYONE was on a Julia Child kick. I didn’t want to BE like everyone else. I read through the recipe, thinking, WHAT was the big deal about this dish, really? PLEASE, it’s a simple BEEF STEW, I scoffed.

I thought about that recipe for two weeks. Encouraged by the imagined simplicity of it, I’d look at it with one eyebrow raised, imagining all the steps in my mind. I would read it before going to sleep, my culinary vocabulary hiccupping over the French terms.

I plotted my conquest of it during my lunch hour at work, carefully listing the ingredients to buy, outlining my strategies in the kitchen. I finally decided I would make it, more to prove my point that it was a simple dish of beef stewed in wine–nothing more–and please can people just please pipe down about it already!

What I didn’t know was that cooking the dish would not only humble me, but would drag me by the apron strings out of the kitchen and out of my writing slump.

I’m not going to explain the steps in how the dish is made. There are countless other blogs who have done me the favor, describing their experience in great detail. I realize this is because the recipe is actually quite involved, and has several laborious steps. An exploration of it warrants a detailed description that hopefully breaks it down into more manageable cooking procedures for the next home cook to tackle.

But I won’t bore you with the details, because in the end, just as in life, the details didn’t matter. In the end, what happened to me while cooking it is the real story.

I started out that morning at Santa Monica’s Farmer’s Market on Cloverfield.

I wanted to get as many fresh, local ingredients for the dish as I could. There were many stalls of fresh produce, their bright colors filling my eyes.

Back in the kitchen, I took stock my ingredients, stepped back to gather my wits about me and plunged in.

Staying as faithful to Julia Child’s directions as possible, I sliced, seared, sauteed and  seasoned for the next four hours.

And the thing is, these methods aren’t new to me. But I started to realize I’d never really made anything French before (fries, maybe, but that doesn’t count).

And it occurred to me that I’d never really made anything by Julia Child, and had never cooked with the combination of stuff like chianti and bay leaves and garlic and thyme.

So the smells and colors and flavors that bloomed from the stove into a warm cloud of Juliachildfrenchness in the kitchen was something I had never smelled, or seen, or tasted. At least, nothing I’d ever made myself before. And tasting something for the very first time–that’s one of the purest experiences someone who loves food can ever have.

It was also the first time I’d taken a shot at making a bouquet garni–a bundle of aromatic herbs wrapped in cheesecloth–that seasoned the onions as they braised in stock. That tiny thing fascinated me, only because I’d never made it before.

Somewhere between searing batches of meat in bacon fat (doesn’t that just sound dangerously yummy?) and talking to the mushrooms as they turned golden in butter (“Please be perfect, little shrooms!”), I found my cooking groove again. You know, the kind that makes me know when to check on something just from the smells of it, or tunes my pulse to the rhythm of rattling pan lids as their contents bubble away. I was cooking again, cooking for myself, and just like that, the words came hurtling out of the cupboard of my mind. I was already beginning to write this blog post as I finished the dish, exclaiming after the first tasting, “This is perhaps the best thing I have ever made. Ever.”

The flavors were robust, complicated and comforting at the same time. I couldn’t wait to sit down and write about it.

And just as I cooked for myself, I realized that all that really matters is that I write for myself. Because when I do, I get to celebrate my favorite domestic pursuits, the way only I can.

So, this is the long story of how Julia Child and Boeuf Bourguignon were the aphrodisiac that made me fall back in love with my blog (“Kami na ulit!”). I didn’t want to channel Julie Powell, but sometimes, the dishes choose us as much as we choose them. Julia Child spent all that loving time on that phenomenal dish, and probably didn’t know how some day, the experience of making Boeuf would wake someone like me up from a slumber I didn’t quite know how to get out of.

I was wrong. It ISN’T just beef stew. It’s braised bliss and stewed serendipity, all in one glorious, happy, delicious pot.

Welcome back to me. And how have YOU been?

—

Thank you, E., for hunting down pearl onions with me, leaving me alone in the kitchen when I needed to be and reassuring me that it was only a matter of time before I found my words again. And also for introducing me to Cactus Cooler, which I will now always remember as the perfectly odd beverage pairing for Boeuf! Haha.

Hello there!

I seem to always come back from breaks with a cupcake post. (Like in this case.) Why is that? I guess it’s because cupcakes are happy, little things that seem to say, “Ta-daaah!” all by themselves.

These were fun favors made for my friend Jen’s bridal shower. As you can tell, her wedding colors are lavender and purple (the pink sprinkles are because she loves that color too!) I thought edible favors were a good idea because they’re practical and don’t end up gathering dust on someone’s shelf or, much worse, being thrown away.

I found this awesome Etsy seller who can customize these neat cupcake holders for you. They have an adhesive strip on the back that closes up the liner around the cooked and cooled cupcake. The seller put my request on the side (the words “Jen’s Getting Married!”) with a silhouette of a wedding dress, and even put silver sparkles around the design! So pleased with how they turned out.

It’s much easier to decorate these after they’re in the holder. These were Vanilla Cupcakes with Buttercream from the Magnolia Bakery cookbook, and were so easy to decorate.

Taking these home was easy with these individual cupcake containers that took me weeks to find online. There are many cupcake packaging options out there, like boxes with inserts and windows to see your frosting designs through (Bake It Pretty has tons!). But since the writing on the liners was the star for these, I had to find carriers that showed the whole cupcake. They have special grooves that hold the cupcake in place. Neat, huh? I got these from here.

I brought them to the shower in a basket lined with tissue and decorated with twirly ribbons.

Fun to make, even more fun to eat! (Yum–thanks for this pic, Julie!)

Hope your week’s going by sweetly!

Let me torture you today with these sticky, sweet, made-from-scratch Cinnamon Sticky Buns that my mom just took out of the oven. Beautiful! This makes me remember how my own forays into bread making started from Mama’s copy of “Beard On Bread” many years ago. Wow, Ma! The Golden Spoon Of Kitchen Awesomeness goes to you! Yum!

Hello, Lover.

What could be more seductive than the sweet promise of smooth, creamy, dense cheesecake, with a good old-fashioned graham cracker crust, topped with the freshest berries, a homemade strawberry sauce and cream whipped from scratch? Nothing, I think! Like the city named after it, this dessert has me by the heartstrings. This is the only kind of cheesecake I really like. And hence the only kind of cheesecake I make.

This was to celebrate my brother’s girlfriend’s graduation. It bakes for quite a bit—I start checking at 45 minutes—and cools in the oven for at least four hours after I’ve turned it off. The slow cooling in the oven prevents cracks on top of the cake. It’s a cheesecake purist’s dream when eaten on its own.

What even made it more special is that I finally had the chance to use this beautiful handcrafted cake stand and plate made for me by my friend Sara’s dad, a true artisan in every sense. He makes awesome pottery as a hobby in Hawaii—he shapes them, hand-paints the designs himself and glazes them in his own kiln. I casually asked her one day if he’d consider custom-making a cake plate for me, not really being serious about it. She brought back two of different sizes for me after Christmas, one of which had my letter “J” cleverly built into the design. I swear I was speechless. This kind of craftsmanship deserves only the best desserts!

After decorating the top with fresh strawberries and my standard berry syrup (simple sugar + berries = awesome), I thought it needed a little something extra.

I found a bar of white chocolate in the snacks bin at home and found that with a potato peeler, you can make these elegant white chocolate shavings that complete this divine dessert.

Perfect!

Hope you have a sweet weekend, all! It’ll be a long one for us here in the US because of Independence Day, and I’ll be busy cookin’ and craftin’, but I won’t be too much of a stranger this time!

Would you like a better bacon? By “better” I don’t mean there’s less fat or sodium in it. Let’s face it—bacon is bacon. You don’t futz around with it. It’s perfect in all its fatty, salty glory: golden brown, crispy around the edges, the perfect partner to pancake and eggs. Ahhh, bacon. Breakfast wouldn’t be the same without it.

One of my pet peeves when cooking bacon is having to stand over the stove top, waiting for it to be done. I have to keep tending to it—flipping it over so it doesn’t burn, making sure it browns evenly, gingerly maneuvering my way around the hot pan to make sure the oil doesn’t splatter, inhaling all the bacon fumes. I mean, don’t get me wrong—the smell of sizzling bacon makes me weak in the knees. But if I cook it, and have to stand over the stove the whole time, I end up smelling like bacon. And smelling like cured, cooked pork belly just isn’t my thing, you know?

And so, I set out to find an easier solution to my bacon bugaboo and found out that the next best thing to patience is…the oven! Baking bacon is easy and fuss-free. It WILL take about 20 minutes or so, but that time can be spent scrambling eggs and making pancakes since your hands are left free to cook other things with wild abandon.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

After lining your cookie sheet (make sure it has a lip/small wall) with foil, lay your bacon pieces out, with the edges just slightly touching each other.

Place cookie sheet on the middle rack of your oven and set your timer to 15 minutes. During this time, you are free to do whatever you want. You can make your other breakfast components (yummy ideas: these sweet Nutella-Banana Crepes or this savory Southwestern Omelet). Or you can dance around in your kitchen, figure out the square root of pi or ponder on the meaning of life.

After 15 minutes, check on your bacon. Flip the strips over with some tongs—be careful—don’t burn yourself! (Because I’m clumsy, I did.) Bake for another 3-5 minutes. They’re perfect when they’re golden brown, like this:

Lay them on some paper towels to drain. You’ll see that I burned some by placing those on the bottom rack of the oven. Those are extra crunchy, but still good!

Good morning!

There’s no looking back! Why I’m going to be baking bacon from now on:

1) You set it and forget it.

2) The bacon doesn’t shrink as much and comes out well formed and crispy.

3) Clean-up is easy, just toss away used foil lining.

4) I end up eating my breakfast, not smelling like it!

Happy curly mornings to you!

I’ve been making these for years, ever since an aunt gifted me with the cookbook Mrs. Field’s Best Cookie Book Ever (ever!). Well, she didn’t so much give it to me as I hinted, repeatedly, that I’d really really really love a copy. So, she gave me hers. Maybe more to shut me up than anything. Haha.

Jessica’s Marshmallow Clouds are made with frozen mini marshmallows that you encase in chocolate cookie dough before baking. I wish I could post pictures of how I made these, but I have to say these are a bit on the messy side to make, so my hands were full of dough! The result is a gooey chocolate cookie that’s extra soft in the middle because of the marshmallow surprise. You see a little of the yummy stuff in between breaks on tops of the cookies. Heavenly! These are among my favorite cookies to make, despite the mess.

 I made these for a recent movie date with friends. Concession stands in movie houses here charge so much for snacks—so the next best thing is to sneak some of your own in! I packaged these in individual sandwich bags, along with little snack bags of gummi worms that I had gotten in bulk. The two snackies made for awesome theater treats! 

Hope your week is off to a sweet start!

I have a confession to make.

This confession is hidden in a sinful red box.

And if it were to be stamped with a shameful scarlet letter, that letter would be a burning “B.”

(Cue dramatic violin music…)

Ta-daaa!

I made the cake above with a doctored cake mix from Betty—Betty Crocker, that is! Oh the shame! And the wagging fingers! Oyoyoy. I can hear my aunts (one of who is ironically named Auntie Betty!) clucking their tongues at me. All sins aside, this Strawberry Dream Cake was nothing to be ashamed of! It was a great dessert for a barbeque: fruity, cool, moist and creamy in each mouthful.

There are several variations of Strawberry Dream Cake, some of which use strawberry gelatin. I brought this to a potluck at a vegetarian friend’s house, so I knew the gelatin version wouldn’t fly (some gelatin is from ground animal bones, did you know?)

The cake itself has pureed fresh strawberries in it, so the white-cake-mix batter turned a slight pink.

Now I have no idea how this Strawberry Dream Cake came to be named as such, but I DO know that the dreamy part of it is the whipped-cream topping. It has the perfect secret ingredient that works superbly with strawberries: white chocolate! Yum.

The whipped topping also has the surprising ingredient of cream cheese. That, with the chopped white chocolate and some scalded milk, gives you this creamy dreamy sauce that you fold into store-bought whipped-cream topping. (Make the clucking stop!)

The recipe didn’t call for it, but while the cake was a bit warm, I poked some holes through it with the wider end of a chopstick and poured some of the sauce on top. It made for an even moister cake, with the sauce seeping through the holes.

After folding the sauce into the whipped topping, I was worried that it would get thinned out. To my surprise, something in the white chocolate+cream cheese+warm milk concoction stabilizes the whipped topping, making it easy to spread on a cake and firm enough to hold the weight of some halved strawberries.

I wanted a final touch. I spied some of these French Vanilla Pirouette wafer sticks by Pepperidge Farm that were a gift from a friend sitting on the kitchen shelf.

I crushed some of those and sprinkled them on top. They set off the red strawberries beautifully and provided a sweet crunch.

Voila! A dream worth diving headlong into! Nomnomnom.

Interested in whipping up this dream of a cake yourself? HERE’S the recipe I used.

And now you’ve heard one of my kitchen confessions. My, how the mighty have fallen. Today, a boxed cake mix, tomorrow, who knows?

I’ve recently been on a sheet-cake binge!

Whenever these handi-foil Cook-N-Carry pans with lids go on sale, I stock up on them. They’re so handy to make sheet cakes in, decorate (the domed, clear lid allows you to frost the top however you like), package and just give away.

This means I don’t have to worry about asking for my pans back anymore. And believe me, I’ve lost so many pans over the years, that I think these are just the smarter way to go.

Last week, I had to make two cakes in one week: one for a birthday and another for a christening. Since my Red Velvet Cake calls for buttermilk and they never sell just a cup’s worth, I decided it would be more efficient to make the same kind of cake for the two occasions. I just made them different by changing the ribbons!

A Girly Merry Unbirthday Cake (it was a belated birthday present)

A Little Boy’s “Wow You’re Christian Now” (haha) Cake

The sprinkles are adorable Jumbo Confetti pastel dots from Wilton that I’d also gotten on sale after Easter.

Have a sweet weekend, everyone!

These are new at Trader Joe’s, a specialty food store in the US. When I spied these on a shelf  I had to do a double take. I’d never seen peanut butter cups in this mini size before, and thought they would be interesting in place of chocolate chips in my standard chocolate chip cookies.

They are “ka-ulomol!” That’s a word in my dialect that I don’t even have a direct English translation for. In Tagalog, it would be “nakakagigil,” I guess. Otherwise, it means something along the lines of, “They’re so cute and tiny and I just want to them to get in my belly!”

I had to stop myself from snacking on them while making the cookies. They’re just like little itty bitty Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but since they’re teensy, you tend to pop them in your mouth more readily and easily like you would the regular-sized ones.

And they were absolutely yummy in the cookie dough! Had to stop myself from eating THAT too!

I hope Trader Joe’s keeps this product in stock. Some of their goods are seasonal, like that one time they weren’t selling my favorite lady fingers for some reason. I’d buy these again in a heartbeat, because these cookies were just ooey gooey good!

Now I want to try these next. They’ve been around for a while, but this mini-peanut-butter-cup experiment turned out so well that I’m thinking these would be great too!

Hope you’re having a sweet week, all! (Yum!)

Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with women who all loved to tell stories. I often just sat there, watching and listening (and eating!) as they flitted about stirring pots, kneading dough, shaping candy. The memory of being in the thick of a busy kitchen, the heat from the oven coaxing anything from Gospel truth to gossip from the cooks, is one of my most comforting ones.

It was when their hands were busy when my first cooking teachers found time to spin stories about all their greatest culinary exploits. For my grandma, it was when she made mayonnaise from scratch as a new bride. For my grandaunt, it was making seashell shapes from dough with nothing but the back of a fork and an expert flick of the wrist. But in between tales of baking the most tender-crumbed cake and making the best bunuelos were the inevitable kitchen myths. The foreboding ones, told over and over again so that they started taking a life of their own, transforming from fiction into fact.

One of the more ominous ones is from my nanny, who had taken baking courses at a local school. Nanay Manet’s favorite cooking story was about the unattainable, lofty ideal that is Angel Food Cake. In the humidity of the province, this cake wasn’t the easiest thing to make. Nanay Manet would recount how she often lost the battle of haranguing meringue into submission, all because of that one teeny tiny speck of egg yolk that found its way into the whites. She’d look at me, narrow her eyes and warn, “One drop. One drop! That’s all it takes to ruin the whoooolllleee thing.” And when you DID get yolk-free whites and WERE successful in whipping them into meringue, you had to fold the flour in quickly, quickly, quickly! But yet gently, gently, gently! All in the upper arm! No wrist, just arm! Or the egg whites may deflate! Nooo! Horrors!

Which is why in my 15+ years of baking, I couldn’t bring myself to make an Angel Food Cake. It seemed larger than life for me to do. It was made of whispery clouds and delicate whorls of sweet stuff—something too divine for even me to cobble together.

I bought a tube pan about five years ago but never used it for its intended purpose. But last weekend, I had to come up with a dessert that would go well with strawberries grown on a local farm. Angel Food Cake would be perfect, so it was time to grow up, and grow out, of my eggwhite-ophobia. I HAD to do it.

As I went through the nerve-wracking process of breaking eggs carefully and separating the whites from the yolks, I could hear my heart hammering in my rib cage. I know for some of you this will seem a bit much. But for someone who feels like desserts are an expression of her self, this was a huge, big deal! I wanted everything to be perfect!

I was thinking of Nanay Manet the entire time. Unexpectedly, instead of being hampered by my memories of her cooking myths, I was spurned on by them. Maybe this kind of kitchen confidence comes with age. When I was younger, my movements were more calculated and yet less sure. But that time, with a challenge in front of me, I simply went with my gut, little speck of egg yolk and all.

And this is what happened.

After cooling, I dressed the cake in a fresh strawberry sauce made from equal parts sugar, water and mashed fresh berries cooked until thick. Garnished with some halved white berries that were drizzled with white chocolate, topped off with slivers of fresh lemon rind and little bunches of mint.

I guess I’m waxing poetic about this cake because I’m so proud of myself for making it. More so than usual, since this was a project over 10 years in the making. I had to work up the courage to do it, and finally did. It made me remember what I love most about baking: how it’s part science, part myth and mostly plain old courage.

If there’s that one thing you’ve always wanted to cook or make, grab that wooden spoon, take out those tongs, wield that whisk with confidence and just make it. A little bravery goes a long way!