Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed

This is not a collection of traditional Filipino desserts. California-born Abi Balingit combines her mother’s Filipino treats with influences from other cultures to which she was exposed in the Bay Area, from Mexican paletas to Vietnamese boba tea to Little Debbie snack cakes.

If you are not familiar with Filipino desserts, then Mayumu (the word means sweet), will introduce you to ingredients such as kaong, the fruit of sugar palm trees, and ube, a purple yam. You will also discover things like bibingka (coconut milk-rice cakes baked in banana leaves), caramels flavored with fermented shrimp paste, and chocolate chip cookies enriched with the vinegar soy flavors of adobo.

The sweet-savory contrast is typical of many of Balingit’s desserts, and so too is an exuberance that clearly allows her to take risks and have fun, decorating cookies in the colors of the flag of the Philippines or declaring her New Yorker status with a riff on chocolate rugelach.

Mayumu is a highly personal cookbook with enough appealing enthusiasm to help you try new things.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.