Bibingka Royal Sweet Rice Cake

I found this Filipino dessert, made by FV Foods (they're local to Toronto and Mississauga with several stores), in a Chinese supermarket. It's a rice cake with sugar, egg, butter and coconut milk. Pretty good.

Jack 'N Jill X.O. Chocolate Shake Candy

Well, I'm disappointed. This doesn't taste at all like a chocolate shake. Not, as the packaging purports, "Smooth, rich, as real as it gets". OK, you might say, I should have known, but I was hoping. Perhaps it would taste better, more like a shake, if it wasn't a hard candy, if it was softer, creamier. Certainly, it tastes chocolate-y, but not creamy enough. Ah, well.

Peanut Kisses

Along with the turrones de mani that my Philippine co-worker brought, she also gave me these snacks, what looks to me like peanut macaroons; I say that, because its ingredients are peanuts, cane sugar, egg whites and vanilla, very similar to most macaroon recipes I've made. They taste very peanut-y, and have a crunch to them. Not bad, though I would say an acquired taste.

Turrones de Mani

These Philippine snacks, famous from the city of Cagayan de Oro, were brought in by a co-worker, she brought them back from a recent trip there. Near as I can tell, they contain a mixture of peanuts and honey (the package says it contains the finest bee honey! Bee honey! I didn't realize there was any other kind!) surrounded by a crispy flour shell. Not bad tasting.

Two "White Rabbit" Candies

My beautiful Bride wanted some of the creamy White Rabbit candies from China, and selected a bag just before we paid for our purchases; perhaps it was rushed.

She got this White Rabbit candy instead, from the Philippines.

A butter toffee, brown in colour, not white. The candies are not soft and chewy, rather hard, they shatter when you chew them. The ingredients are sugar, glucose, condensed milk, milk fat, vegetable shortening, iodized salt, lecithin and flavouring.

This is what she had wanted to buy, the Chinese White Rabbit candies.

You can see the candies are white in colour. These are softer and chewier, I like them better than the other White Rabbits. This has a better, at least shorter, ingredient listing - milk, sugar, glucose syrup and butter.

Philippine Calamansi Lemon Powder

Having bought their dried mango powder, I was intrigued by their Calamansi Lemon powder, which can be used in similar ways, as a refreshing drink, as a dip, as a marinade, as a flavour enhancer, in noodles or porridge, and as an ingredient in alcoholic drinks. Too, I think that I could make some interesting lemon shortbread cookies.

Philippine Mango Powder

I came across this product in my local Chinese supermarket, essentially it is dried mango that can be used as a reconstituted juice by adding water, or you can add it to shakes or smoothies to give it a nice mango flavour. What I thought I could do with it, is to use it to make mango shortbread cookies.

Dried Mangoes

I was paying for these at the checkout, and the cashier asked me whether I had ever tried these, I had not, and said so, and asked her why. She said that they were really good tasting. Having tried other dried mango slices before, and finding, like most dried fruits, them to be tough and chewy, I decided to take her statement as is, and see for myself whether they were any good. And they are. Really good. Not tough and chewy, definitely dried, but still soft and tasty, too. They smell wonderful, almost like fresh mango. These come from the Philippines, from a company called 7D, and are, according to the package, which I am reading as I am writing this, and long after I had tried several pieces, 'dried just enough to attain the chewiness that you desire and the great mango flavour that you savour bite after bite'. They are sweetened with cane sugar, with a little sodium metabisulfite as a preservative, and to keep the colour. I'll have to go back for more.