Our baking is sans rival!

We made not one, but two, Filipino specialties this month--a sans rival cake and batch of bibingkas--during a weekend jaunt to Big Sur. I never thought daring bakers would involve the use of a fermented egg, but hey, that's why we're daring, right?*

Sans Rival Cake

The cake recipe, despite its filipino origin, seemed mighty familiar to us, evoking in particular this cake (as an aside - wow! That link is from 2008). But instead of hazelnuts, this meringue contains toasted cashews.

This recipe required separating 10 eggs. As we've learned in the past, the second you break a yolk into the egg whites, it's all over - the whites will never set up into the stiff peaks necessary for meringue. I'm proud to say that it only took us 14 eggs to get to the requisite 10 whites, and we were able to use the "ruined" eggs for the Bibingkas.

After crushing up the cashews and carefully folding them into our successful egg whites, we baked four separate layers to a toasty golden.

The buttercream recipe was excellent. I've never made it by tempering the eggs with a simple syrup, but I don't think I'll ever do it another way again. The frosting was rich, fluffy, and delicious. The addition of almond extract also made for a nice touch.

Yet another improvised cake display - this is an upside-down fiestaware pie dish, but it worked quite well.

Luckily we had a birthday to celebrate (and a birthday girl who happened to love cashews!), so we stuck some candles in and enjoyed!



Bibingkas

The bibingkas required some modification on our part. Despite our clear proximity to many asian grocery stores, I was not able to pick up some fermented eggs or banana leaves. So we made do, with a regular hard boiled egg and some parchment paper. Not many pictures of our prep, but here's the final product:


It was great to work with rice flour, in anticipation of a secret project Erica and I are working on. More to come on that very soon!

A final parting shot of Big Sur:


Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers’ host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious Sans Rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog.

* Disclaimer: we did not actually obtain a fermented egg... Whoops.