If you were at this year’s Ultimate Taste Test Pro Edition, you may have noticed a beeline heading for the Ted’s booth, wanting to get a taste of their Bibingka Cheesecake. If you were there, you may have also noticed the unassuming baker behind the popular cheesecake, Chef Gel Salonga. Hailing from Santa Cruz, Laguna, Chef Gel wanted to create a dessert that showcased their town’s most popular products, namely kesong puti and salted duck eggs. With both ingredients being on the salty side, a salty-sweet dessert was the way to go and what better vehicle for cheese and eggs was there than a dessert that already makes use of both as primary ingredients—cheesecakes.
For our cover this month, we wanted something that captures the spirit of the holidays, Filipino style. As the yuletide season draws ever nearer, we’re reminded that indeed, Christmas season in the Philippines is something to behold. From Simbang Gabi to parols to puto bumbong and bibingka, we celebrate Christmas like no one else on the planet. As much as Christmas is a foreign concept which we’ve made into our own, the same goes for Chef Gel’s Bibingka Cheesecake. While baked cheesecakes may be more at home in New York joints like Junior’s, Chef Gel seamlessly incorporates very traditional Filipino ingredients into her version, blending and fusing flavors perfectly. It’s as if bibingka and cheesecake were always destined for each other. The resulting dessert has become so successful and well loved, it actually won the “People’s Choice” award at the recently concluded Ultimate Taste Test, Pro Edition.
Chef Gel wasn’t always into baking as some people assume. A former finance professional who has worked in multinational corporations like ING, Philip Morris and even Nestlé, Singapore, Chef Gel isn’t your typical baking-before-she-was-walking kind of chef. But personal circumstances and a need for a career breather led her to the kitchen, and after her first red velvet cake, the rest was baking history. Her unique recipes have made her into one of the emerging bakers contributing to the Philippine culinary scene in a span of a few short years. She now runs a couple of restaurants in their hometown of Sta. Cruz, Laguna, namely Ted’s and Aurora Filipino Cuisine together with her brother, Chef Day Salonga and Chef Mon Urbano. For us in the Metro, she supplies desserts to Cazuela—Spanish Colonial Cuisine at The Sapphire Bloc, Ortigas Center, Pasig.
Chef Gel generously shares her Bibingka Cheesecake recipe with us:
Baked Bibingka Cheesecake
Crust
- 1/4 cup melted, butter unsalted
- 1-1/2 cups crushed Graham Crackers
- 2 tbsp powdered sugar
Cheesecake
- 5 (225g) pcs cream cheese, softened
- 5 pcs eggs plus 2 egg yolks
- 1-1/2 cups sugar
- 1/8 cup all purpose flour
- 1/4 cup all-purpose cream
- 1/8 cupcoconut milk
- 2 pc salted egg, shelled and sliced
- 1 pc Kesong Puti
1 Preheat oven to 180˚C.
2 In a bowl, combine all the ingredients for the crust then press firmly against the bottom of the 9-inch spring form pan. Bake for 15 mins.
3 In a large bowl, combine cream cheese, eggs and egg yolks and mix until smooth. Add the sugar, flour, cream and coconut milk. Blend until smooth.
4 Pour batter into prepared pan.
5 Top with salted egg slices and Kesong Puti.
6 Bake in preheated oven for 1 hour. Turn the oven off and let the cake cool in the oven with the door closed for 2 hours until set; this prevents cracking. Chill.