Sweet dreams are made of these
MANILA, Philippines - More than ever, Manila’s city folks are manic about sweets. Call it sugar rush: our instinctive attraction to honey-dipped snacks and sucrose-packed treats. But that attraction is not just for anything that tickles the tongue. Today, we find ourselves lining up for baroque donuts, savory floss-topped buns, and quite notably, the daintiest of cupcakes.
It’s not a slice to share but a whole little cup made for one, not a monster of multiple layers but just a small cup fit for one on a strict diet. It’s also no longer just vanilla. For Cupcakes by Sonja, the beginning of the craze was red velvet — Red Velvet Vixen, to be exact. Like a minx, the color of a kiss mark or the sensual texture of a tight dress. Six years ago, it was love at first sexy bite for Manila’s dessert maniacs; now, they no longer are virgins to gourmet cupcakes.
We’ve always had sugar-coated donuts, syrup-filled buns, and puto, but somehow, the traditional merienda from panaderias and street hawkers hasn’t evolved much for cosmopolitan liking. They remain comforting treats, yes, but, Toto, we’re not in the province anymore. Today’s trusty mixers and refined ingredients make for goose down-soft dough and airy baked sponges, and the allure of contemporary interior design, novel ingredient combinations, wordplay for identifying flavors, and even packaging make for a new retail experience that stimulate curiosity and attract customers in droves.
There was Sonja Ocampo, feeling as if she were on the set of Sex and the City in New York, specifically on the famed setting that was The Magnolia Bakery. If Sarah Jessica Parker biting into an exquisite cupcake made the entire neighborhood chic, Sonja’s stint in the kitchen brought the same kind of chicness to Manila.
Cupcakes by Sonja was in the middle of Serendra, then only a promise of what was to become the glorious shopping and dining spot that is the Bonifacio Global City. Since Sonja’s initial dessert catering for her best friend’s son — a buzz-worthy gig that reached The Philippine STAR pages — she has now made dessert buffets and cupcake towers the thing of wholesome parties.
Dessert places have mushroomed all over the city in the gourmet mold that Sonja introduced, and it is only timely that Sonja finally expands to a new spot: in Glorietta 2’s Bridgeway, and later this year in the posh hoods of Shangri-La Plaza, Eastwood City, Greenhills and TriNoma. Who would have thought that a two-century-old recipe first heard of in Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery as “a cake to be baked in small cups†would be the thing of post-Y2K post-Stepford ladies (and secretly, their feeling-Betty Draper counterparts).
It has never felt newer — as a nostalgic Peanut Butter and Jelly cupcake, as a healthy carrot cupcake, and as an indulgent Valrhona dark chocolate cupcake. Sonja’s display counter has become a grail to come back to again and again with the addition of even more flavors and variants. You can even win some for yourself just by tagging @cupcakesbysonja on Facebook until May 1. If you get the most vote for the most likes, you earn yourself a gourmet treat that, six years later, will still make you yearn for more.
