Cookie Baking

In the Philippines, the way to celebrate birthdays is that you wear red all day so that everyone knows its your birthday, you eat noodles symbolizing that you will have long life, you make mango floats for dessert, and you can go out drinking if you want to after dinner. This plan seemed very unsatisfactory to me, who is used to being treated like a princess on her birthday. My family’s birthday tradition is to do whatever the birthday person wants all day, so the whole family will play all the games you want and go do what you want and mom will cook anything you want. It is a fabulous system. So when I heard that the extent of my birthday celebration would be going out drinking after dinner, I was very sad. (I couldn’t have the mango floats because the eye doctor said mangos are an allergy enhancer so I can’t eat them .) Therefore, I took matters into my own hands and started planning a birthday party for after dinner that did not involve any bars.

I decided that I would bake cookies and have everyone over to my house for games and movies. Little did I know that baking cookies is not something Filipinos do regularly. Because bakeries are so common, most of them do not bake at all and the ingredients for such adventures are not common in stores! Nevertheless, this did not slow me down. In the afternoon, Mackenzie and I scoured the city for white sugar, brown sugar, flour, baking soda, margarine, vanilla, and eggs. At first it didn’t seam like it would be that hard. We found white sugar, brown sugar, flour, and baking soda at Robinson’s (the grocery store in the mall). That seemed like a good start. Then we went downtown to Gaisano (basically Wal-Mart) and found margarine, but they still were out of eggs and told us that they don’t even carry vanilla. We figured that the cookies would be alright without vanilla but eggs were not really an option. It is very interesting how every store in the area here will get a stock of something at the same time, but then they will all be out of the same thing at the same time as well. This happens with eggs evidently. We asked every employee in Gaisano if they knew where we could buy eggs and one girl told us about a market we had never heard of a few blocks away, so we decided to go there. I was getting rather worried because I REALLY wanted these cookies by this point. I had spent my entire birthday afternoon traipsing around grocery stores for them and by golly, I was going to get them! We went to the market, found eggs, bought two of them (because you just grab the eggs out of the giant cartons and take them to the cashier) and headed home feeling very triumphant.

After dinner I decided to start baking so that the cookies would be ready by the time people started coming over at 7. We whipped out the ingredients, melted the margarine on the stove top, and started measuring the sugar. About that time, Don, one of the other volunteers, walked in with Chab’s cousin Shay (he is staying at her house) and decided he would help. When we opened the brown sugar we were surprised to find it had the consistency of the chocolate powder you put in milk to make chocolate milk. By this point though, I was not giving up on those cookies, so our motto became “lets just see what happens.” When we tried to mix the melted margarine, white sugar, and brown sugar, the butter refused to mix with the sugars at all, so we had this rock hard brown stuff at the bottom of the bowl in a pool of margarine. When no amount of stirring could fix this problem we just added the eggs. After that, everything mixed well. . .except that the consistency was something similar to molasses. Now, these cookies were a challenge as well as a treat. I had never made molasses cookies, but we were going to find out how they tasted. We added the rest of the ingredients, made Don stir the mix because we were too weak because it was so thick, and were pleasantly surprised with some dough that tasted remarkably similar to cookie dough.

I was thrilled, we had prevailed against the ingredients. However, we were then informed that our oven is broken. Our family does not bake, so they didn’t really need to fix it. Nanay Pipay was as optimistic as ever though and told us to try the center. On our way there we stopped by Shay’s house to get another pan and picked up another one of her cousins (Mia) in the process. Sadly however, the center’s oven was also broken, so we went to every person’s house in Bliss that we know. Every oven in the neighborhood was either broken or out of gas. By this point we had also picked up Naomi and Amber and were a group of 8 scoping out the neighborhood for an oven. Eventually we decided the best plan would be to go back to our house, cook the cookies in the toaster oven and play cards while they baked. This turned out to be the best decision of the day. While the 5 volunteers sat around and talked, the 3 11-year-olds baked the cookies (by baking the cookies, I mean they sat and watched them bake and I would take them out and place new ones in the oven every 4 minutes). After the first batch came out, we got one giant candle (we had forgotten to buy candles in our hunt for ingredients), sang, and tried our masterpieces. They were incredibly good! They had the consistency of little muffins, but they still tasted like cookies, so I was happy.

We spent the rest of the night laughing and playing. We could only bake 4 cookies at a time, so every time a batch came out everyone got half a cookie. We taught the younger girls spoons and played for at least an hour. It was so cute because Shay would scream every time she had to reach for a spoon, so everyone would know they needed to grab the spoons. They also taught us the Filipino version where you have a partner and you and your partner have a signal. When one of the two partners gets four of a kind they have to signal their partner, who has to see the signal and say “signal” before anyone else realizes they are sending the signal and says “cut”. Therefore, the game changed from focusing on getting four of a kind and watching spoons to trying to get four of a kind and trying to watch every other person so that you could say “signal” or “cut” if you noticed anything. It was ridiculous! I was partners will Chab and Mackenzie was with Shay, but we were sad because Mackenzie and Shay were always winning. At the end of the game we found out that their signal had been to touch feet under the table so that no one could see it and say “cut”! I decided that this behavior was cheating and Don backed me up because it was my birthday so we laughed about it and taught the girls Egyptian Rat, which Don eventually one. It was very late by the time everyone went home and I was very happy. My birthday had turned out beautifully even though it was so different than home. Sadly it wasn’t a very Filipino birthday, but I’m not complaining, I had the two things I really needed to make it fun, friends and small children. It was great.