Pan de Sal

Pan de Sal is the most popular bread in the Philippines. Usually eaten for breakfast and snacks with any filling - cheese, leftover adobo, corned beef, coconut jam, condensed milk, whatever you have! I searched the net for some recipes but can’t find a good one. Most of the recipes I found use baking powder, which I think shouldn’t be used for pan de sal. Anyway, my recipe is using a pre-ferment (sponge) made of flour, water, and yeast, which I wait to ferment for at least 4 hours, and I only used these ingredients – flour (bread and wholemeal), salt, sugar, yeast, water, milk or whipping cream (for nicer taste and texture), butter (to help the bread stay moist and also help the dough rise), and cornmeal (for dusting, so there is no need to oil the pan…makes it so slippery).

Pan de sal below is made only with bread flour (the shop I usually go to ran out of wholemeal). I like the wholemeal version more….

Chocolate Crinkles

I was thinking of what would be fun to do with my kids and thought of – chocolate crinkles! I made the dough around 2 pm, and when my son came back from school, it’s ready to shape and roll!

When it’s time to shape and roll, both my kids wore their aprons, and they both started to eat the dough instead of shaping and rolling into the powdered sugar….here’s the proof: 

 

That’s why I love it when my kids help me do these! It may be messy but it’s so much fun! Here’s the end product:

The Dark Dark Cheesecake

My son loves to bring biscuits to school and always forgets to eat. And when he's back, it all mushed up. Who would want to eat that? So I thought, why not make a cheesecake? And to hide these bits and pieces of different coloured biscuits (imagine combination of oreo, cheese and peanut biscuits), I decided to make a dark dark cheesecake. It's dark, moist, not too sweet, and very chocolatey! Next time, I'll add dark chocolate chips or some chopped nuts.

The Dark Dark Cheesecake

The Dark Crust
So I crushed all the biscuits finely (about 200g), they did not stay long enough in my son's bag, and added some cocoa (about 3 T) to darken the mixture, sugar (1 T) to sweeten it a bit, and melter butter (1/3 cup) to bind everything together. Pressed it on to the bottom of a non-stick 9" springform pan, and baked it at 180 C for 10 minutes. Set aside.

The Dark Filling
Make sure all ingredients are in room temp
500g cream cheese
1/3 cup butter
1-1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup good quality cocoa
3 eggs
250g sour cream

Cream the cream cheese and butter until there are no more lumps. Add in the sugar and cocoa and mix till well combined. Beat in the eggs one at a time then add the sour cream. Pour into the springform pan and bake at 150 C for 50 mins to an hour. Run a spatula around the edge and set aside to cool. Once cool, put a cling wrap on top and refrigerate for at least 5 hours before serving

Serve with whipped cream and some chocolate syrup....