It has been ages since I started craving for pancakes. Any type – buttermilk, banana, oatmeal, or whatever I might come up with. For some reason, I never found time to make any.

A few days ago, my neighbour gave me a bag of sweet potatoes (camote). They were small, very sticky when cooked and quite sweet. I thought I’d make pancakes!

I also had a few carrots that needed to be used quickly. They had been sitting in the refrigerator too long, because I was vacillating between a carrot cake and a meatless pasta sauce, and failed with both. Well then, sweet potato pancakes with carrots? Might it turn out well?

For this week’s Luntiang Lunes (Meatless Monday) recipe, I chose to cook soup, something quick and simple and good to have on cold, rainy days. Patola and misua soup as an accompaniment to a meal can be prepared in less than an hour yet it completely satisfies.

This is a dish that I grew up with. My grandmother would cook it to pair with dry mains such as fried or grilled fish. It is similar to another, suam ebun, or eggdrop soup in taste and ease of cooking.

Perhaps a common ‘ailment’ of many food bloggers is that we can’t resist tinkering with recipes. Even an excellent recipe can still be improved or tweaked to create another one. Speciation, culinary style, I suppose.

After my last experiment on an instant chocolate cake baked in the microwave, which in turn is based on a recipe from the BBC, I thought that I had been choco’d out since I am an unapologetic non-chocoholic. Well, ok to dark chocolate per se but not to what goes with it. I found the last recipe ok, as long as you don’t eat it in one sitting. It is definitely chocolatey, dense and resembles a French gateau more than a light sponge or chiffon cake. However, I found that using one egg for the miniscule proportions was still too heavy for my taste.

As soon as I sampled the first cake, the cogs in my brain started turning. The recipe needs to be slightly revised to cut down on the richness. Sweeten it up a bit to make it more palatable to others. How about using orange instead of vanilla extract?

And so here goes the revised cake recipe.

Somebody has been pestering me to bake a French chocolate cake for a bit of time now. I have been meaning to but I’m not in a baking mood. However, I promised that person that I will try something easier as a prelude to that rich, chocolate cake.

I am positive that almost everyone has received a copy of the chocolate cup cake that is baked in the microwave. It has been going around for years! Not being a chocoholic (and I won’t apologise for that), I never got the motivation to try it – until now.

No scheduled meeting and the rain making me too lazy to read, I thought of tinkering in the kitchen. Why not the chocolate cake? After all, it’s only a double serving. If I won’t like it, it won’t take a day or two to finish. And if I do like it, it will be easy to replicate! And so I checked the different versions of the recipe and decided on this one from the BBC. I decided on a few revisions though.

One of the things that I have wanted to do since even before I started food blogging is to recreate the old-fashioned bibingka. Today’s rice cake is quite fluffy, almost like bread. I still dream of the bibingka from Da Luming’s stall, beside the San Vicente Chapel (in Sta. Rita, of course). It was thin, used pure galapong (ground rice), didn’t have much eggs and some didn’t even use any baking powder. The cake was chewy and light.

More than a year ago, I interviewed someone from Becuran (my grandmother’s barrio) who knew how the old-style bibingka were made. She confirmed that they indeed didn’t use much eggs, if at all.

Soon, soon… I hope to get right back to the research. I’m digging up all my notes now.

Leftovers? What’s so appetising about leftovers?

Everything! That is if you’re in the Filipino kitchen.

It’s the perfect time to have all those leftovers for Lasang Pinoy 15: Recycled, Reloaded, which Mike is hosting at Lafang. I am also perhaps one of the best persons to talk about leftovers since they make up some of my best childhood memories.

Many Filipinos, rich and poor alike, hold celebrations for a child’s first and seventh birthdays. I really have not dug up the significance of these years but I suspect they have something to do with the transition from one stage of a child’s life to another which also correspond with their growing consciousness (from “wala pang muwang” or a total innocent to “may isip na” – capable of thought). To a certain extent, both the first and seventh years are rites of passage for both the child, whether male or female, and the parents.

It is for this reason that birthdays on these years are big events, not necessarily extravagant but certainly something planned and awaited. Relatives, neighbours and friends drop in on the party, more often than not also bringing food which means the celebration might stretch for days.