It’s been two and a half years since I first made and wrote about bibingka on this blog. Let’s just say I can fully understand why it is one of those native delicacies that one purchases from an expert rather than whips up in the backyard on a regular basis… However, now that I am on a semi-diet, meaning trying to control caloric intake, I get these bizarre food cravings for things I should NOT eat right now. So I used as an excuse the birthday lunch of a crew member today to take out the old bibingka “stove” with the rusting top broiler attachment…

The recipe for the easy store bought rice flour bibingka galapong is here, and you can adjust ingredients to taste if you decide to brave it. I suspect it would turn out reasonably well in an oven as well, just broil at the last minute or two to burnish the top of the rice cake. Just pour the batter into some prepared and buttered banana leaves over coals…

Put the top heating element over the batter and twiddle your thumbs for a few minutes. Check after say 5 minutes to see how it’s doing…

You will quickly figure out if you have too many coals going, too little, etc. based on the first disaster of a bibingka. As with pancakes, the first rice cake ALWAYS gets screwed up. As soon as you are able to calibrate the heat and everything gets nice and hot (including the pottery baking vessel)… it gets much easier.

Readers sometimes ask how I end up doing so many posts and things always seem to turn out nice. STOP RIGHT THERE. I often have complete disasters in the kitchen, I just don’t write about a lot of them. :) Over the past year, I have baked pan de sals nearly a dozen times, and I still don’t have a recipe I am happy with and would publish. Forget about a plain white puto, I have given up on that for now. An ube puto I have in the archives, but a plain white puto is WICKEDLY hard to get right. And finally, while I have seen a master make the thinnest of lumpia wrappers, I have attempted this again and again at home to no avail. So you see, it isn’t all hunky dory in the Marketman kitchen. And the more I look at my list of pinoy food nemeses, the more I realize it is the supposedly simplest recipes with the fewest ingredients that are the most difficult to master… As for the bibingka, the first one here looks like a three alarm fire disaster, but it still tasted pretty darn good. We made 8 bibingkas today, and I ate a two inch wedge. My craving is gone, the crew are happy (birthday lunch included pancit palabok, insasal na manok, lechon) and fattened up, while I had to settle for a large green salad topped with the meat (no skin) of two pieces of chicken inasal… :)

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