Guilt-less Fantasies Cupcakes

Although I love sweets, I have never been a cake person. This is why I don't pay much attention to cupcakes. Besides being a heavy snack, a cupcake can be hideously fattening! Sometimes, though, very pretty and very cute cupcakes make me want to eat them!

If you do pay attention to the sugar content in food in order to keep from getting fat, or if you are a diabetic, these cupcakes will be good news to you. A supplier called Guilt-less Fantasies produces sugar free cupcakes in various custom made designs. For a recent baby shower, we got these wonderful cupcakes. Charming!

 More pictures after the jump!

Yabu Restaurant, Megamall

Cross-section of a deep fried oyster. Yum!

It is no secret that my husband and I love Japanese food. If we're out and the question of where to eat comes up, nine out of ten times the answer will be a Japanese restaurant. Since we are both creatures of habit (ie, we are too lazy to venture out of our usual stomping grounds) our favorite eating places of Japanese food are quite few. 

Luckily, we chanced upon a new restaurant in Megamall, called Yabu, quite near Teriyaki Boy where we have our usual Japanese fare. On the window is a sign that says "soft opening": we knew we were up for something new.

Mochi Balls: Conquered

Finally, I found galapong! It made a world of difference. Although my shelled sweet beans ended up in the trash, I used cubes of cheddar cheese and my mochi balls ended up sweet-salty-sticky, yummy!

Long Weekend Day 2: Glutinous Rice Balls

One of my favorite frozen yogurt toppings is mochi. This sweet, chewy treat compliments the creamy tartness of yogurt. You could say I'm a mochi fan. So when I found a magazine recipe for mochi, I was completely won over. Never mind that its a Filipino recipe and the type of mochi that I like are Japanese almond-scented ones. For weeks, I read and re-read the recipe and imagined myself chewing on a piece of home made mochi at home. 

Never mind that I never handled galapong before or that I don't even like beans. I wanted to make mochi filled with sweet bean paste, like the one in the picture above. I even spent the whole afternoon shelling red beans; a very long process involving not only one cup, like the recipe called for, but rather two, since apparently dried monggo beans expand when soaked overnight. My fingers are still smarting from squeezing out shelled beans from their peel. At the end of a long journey which took most of my free time, I ended up with these: 

Long Weekend Day 1: Chocolate Truffles

It's a known fact that I love chocolates, cream cheese and cocoa powder. Why not have all three in one bite? This is precisely the reason why I created these cocoa powder coated chocolate truffles - I did not exactly invent the recipe, I borrowed a recipe from a magazine for truffle acorns and ended up with these creamy, powdery chocolate treats. Not bad, not at all.

How could the one food that looks like poop end up to be the best tasting food ever invented?

Today was my second attempt at making chocolate truffles; I was confident enough to try making three kinds of them: dark chocolate, white chocolate and milk chocolate. My first attempt was the milk chocolate kind, using Philadelphia cream cheese and Ricoa Easy-Melt baking chocolate chips (semi-sweet milk chocolates). So far, so good: by the time Carlo had recovered from a recent bout of stomach flu (another story) he and I were literally at each other's necks for dibs on the chocolate truffles chilling in the fridge. 

Filipino: Language of the Learned

Because I did not want to promote the article itself, I attribute this blog post to a link I found posted by a Facebook friend: AdMU student's essay on Filipino language raises online firestorm

Here's my two-cents on the issue:

For while Filipino may be the language of identity, it is the language of the streets. It might have the capacity to be the language of learning, but it is not the language of the learned.

In the same way that there's cockney English and pidgin Latin, there's Filipino spoken on the streets: salitang balbal. This is far removed from beautifully spoken Filipino, the Filipino language of the learned. Mr. Soriano has probably never read great literary masterpieces written in Filipino. His knowledge of the Filipino language is a slap in the face for Amado V. Hernandez, Lualhati Bautista and all of us who appreciate the beauty of Filipino as our native language.

Surprise, Surprise!

I can't believe how time flies! Last time I posted on this blog, I was twenty five and unmarried. Now I am twenty six and unbelievably happy. It's a puzzle how I ended up this way, I think its a combination of events that led up to my current generally happy disposition. As an update, and because they paint a thousand words, here are some of my life's significant events in the past months, in pictures:

I tied the knot with my sweetie of nine years in a gorgeous church wedding last December. If I were to do it over and over again - this whole wedding business, I would always get married to the same person and in exactly the same way. :-)

A few months later, we spent a week in Coron, Palawan, a piece of paradise on Earth, if I say so myself. I will not trade vacationing in our own Coron with traveling to Europe or the U.S. or whichever popular tourist destination. I guess its just my kind of honey moon place. Now I can tell anyone from anywhere that I've visited the most beautiful place in my country - or the whole world, for that matter.

Some of the happy trips I've gone to during the year include an office trip to Davao and a trip with college friends to Bataan. I feel so blessed to have such wonderful people in my life!

Ala-Saturday afternoon teenage flick series

Let's do it! Taken at Pearl Farm, Davao