Slicing Mamon

A couple of weeks ago, my half-Filipina boss brought some Filipino goodies (c/o her parents that visited from Manila) which included Choc-Nut, peanut brittle, dried mangoes, barquillos and mamon.

There was only one piece of mamon which she divided into four. (There are actually five of us in the team but one of our team members arrived late that morning so he didn't even get to taste the mamon. Too bad for him.)

When we were in Manila, getting mamon was a simple matter of driving to one of the Red Ribbon or Goldilocks branches. Here in Australia, although there are a lot of popular pastries and goodies, they don't have anything similar to mamon.

When I got my mamon quarter, my taste buds sent signals to my brain (and my tummy) reminding me how good mamon could be. At that moment, I knew that one of my next baking experiments had to be mamon.

Over the next few days, I surfed the net for recipes and eventually I noted down a couple for mamon and taisan. (I don't have mamon molds here so I figured taisan in a loaf pan would be simpler.)

MyGirl and I decided to make our taisan last Sunday. It seems that there is no such thing as cake flour here in Australia so I used all purpose flour instead. The two loaves turned out beautifully (biased opinion, of course).

When I called the rest of the family to taste the taisan, I asked my standard question, "Shall I divide it into ten?"

(My rationale : with ten slices, we could each have two slices -- one for now and another one for later.)

It seems that RD had a different idea. You see as soon my question came out, he quickly responded, "No, FIVE!"

The others expressed their concurrence and I was obviously outvoted.

Needless to say, the taisan was gone in a flash.

(Should I have taken a picture of an empty chopping board and added the captions BEFORE and AFTER? Well, this was a pretty short-lived state for the taisan BEFORE we sliced it into five.)

Yes indeed, I had 1/5 of a loaf of taisan. And it was good!

I seriously believe we could have finished off the two loaves in one evening if I let them slice the second one. (We had the second one the day after.)

What a big difference from the time I sliced off one SINGLE mamon (yes, one piece of mamon, not one taisan loaf) into nine, or possibly 12, pieces to make little squares and wedges. We were having a batch meeting and people were supposed to bring some snacks to share. There was a lot of different goodies and I wanted people to have the option to take some mamon yet have enough space to have other things as well.

All I managed to do was to shock everyone in the room not only because I sliced up the mamon into tiny pieces but because I didn't even open the packaging and had used a ruler to do the slicing.