I just thought I’d write a quick THANK YOU to all of you who visit the blog — and an apology for all the late replies and yet unsent replies to your comments and questions.

For everyone requesting the recipe for pandesal, click here. It’s not your traditional pandesal, but I encourage you to play around with it. You don’t have to use whole wheat — using regular bread flour will give you a lighter, less dense pandesal. Try using evaporated milk instead of regular milk, this is also a common Filipino touch. If you want an even lighter bread, add an egg to the dough. Lastly, try it without any egg or milk. You’ll be left with the more traditional recipe, one that’s very similar to those crusty artisanal breads people rave about. Breadmaking shouldn’t be scary. If you fail the first time, DO try and try again! That’s how I and every other baker I know learned. Every bread is a new experience. Just when I think I know everything about baking bread, I fail, I get humbled, and have to get back up again and start with a new dough or a new starter. The fun is in the learning.

Incidentally, I’ve been neglecting to mention it here, but Aisa and I started a baking blog for b5media, over at Baking Delights. Since we live in a big city again, surrounded with lots of friends, etc., we have people to “experiment on” (hee hee) and are always finding willing and able victims. So even though the family can’t consume a lot of the things that we bake, we just bring it to a group activity and it disappears. We get the pleasure of creating and our friends have the pleasure of eating them! So if you’re looking for bread, cake or recipes, come visit us there. Yes, we feature allergy-free goods from time to time. Still working on those! I still have cake and cornbread recipes that I got from Jenn’s that I haven’t posted. And a different cake recipe that I experimented on — not bad!

And for those requesting my siomai recipe, I PROMISE to post it in the next couple of weeks. I *had* it at Noodles and Rice, but lost half of the post when we moved over from AboutWeblogs to b5media’s servers — and didn’t catch it until recently, so I had assumed all of my earlier posts were intact. I do know that Karen has a very popular siomai recipe, so if you need one right now, please go and visit her so you can make your siomai right away!

As for the putong puti, I haven’t had time to experiment again, but it’s on my calendar for January! So please stay tuned. I actually started a group for recipe testing, specifically for those of you who asked that you be included on the list, but then only two people responded when I sent the invite. So if you’re really interested in testing the puto out, please e-mail me again and we’ll take it from there.

If I don’t get to post much before Christmas, hope you are all having a lovely Advent season. May you be blessed with the Lord’s coming in a special way this year.

Maligayang Pasko at Manigong Bagong Taon!