№ 786. Singapore's Pandan Cake

A fluorescent green cake has become a daily staple in Singapore. Locals grab a slice of the ring-shaped pandan chiffon cake on their way to work or pick up an entire one for friends’ birthday celebrations.

The light, fluffy cake gets its color and subtle grassy vanilla taste from the tropical pandan plant, which is believed to have originated in Indonesia’s Moluccas Islands, and has been used in cooking for hundreds of years.

In Singapore, pandan chiffon cakes started appearing in the 1970s, says local food historian Khir Johari. Today, the dessert is ubiquitous in the city, appearing everywhere from mom-and-pop bakeries to upscale restaurants.

One particular family-owned bakery helped take the cakes citywide, Johari adds.

“I made it popular in Singapore,” says Anastasia Liew, who in 1979 founded the first Bengawan Solo cake shop, a small neighborhood store. “Sorry, we’re not very modest,” chimes in her son Henry, a company director, with a chuckle.

Anastasia initially sold cakes she baked at home but had to open a shop to meet the licensing requirements to sell to department stores. Today, Bengawan Solo has more than 40 shops across the city of six million people.

Henry says the bakery’s popularity comes down to word of mouth, with a little help from celebrity fans. For example, eight years ago Singaporean Mandopop star JJ Lin gifted a Bengawan Solo cake to fellow judges on a Chinese singing show. In 2022, Taiwanese music superstar Jay Chou posted on Instagram about being gifted the cakes when he performed in Singapore.

The company sells other products like kueh lapis, a layer cake, ondeh ondeh, glutinous rice balls filled with palm sugar, and pineapple tarts, pastries filled with fruity jam. But pandan chiffon cake is its best-known product.

Last year, the bakery sold about 85,000 whole pandan chiffon cakes, which cost 22 Singapore dollars ($17) – achieving sales revenue of about 76 million Singapore dollars ($57 million) across its products, up 11% from 2023. But its biggest opportunities may lie overseas.

“I don’t think we can grow very much more in Singapore,” says Henry. He adds that the company plans to focus on selling its products as food gifts across Asia, and hopefully further afield, by working on things like unique packaging. “In the Asian region, there’s a very strong gift giving culture,” he says.

Going global

It’s impossible to leave Singapore’s Changi airport without passing a Bengawan Solo. There are five stores at Changi, the world’s fourth-busiest international airport in 2024, including one in each departure terminal.

The cakes have become wildly popular in places like Hong Kong, where the friends, family, and colleagues of travelers from Singapore often expect a cake. Demand has even sparked a secondary market on Facebook Marketplace and the app Carousell.

Henry says that airport stores now account for more than half of Bengawan’s total sales, and its products seem to be the most popular with travelers from Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.

The company has considered expanding overseas, he says, but it has come up against barriers like high rental costs in Hong Kong. The family also wants to ensure its quality is maintained. Today, it uses mostly local sources for its ingredients and gets the 300 to 400 kilograms of pandan leaves from just across the border in Malaysia.

With or without Bengawan Solo, the global appetite for pandan appears to be growing. In Hong Kong, Pandan Man is selling the cakes in two upscale shopping malls. Pandan cakes, and pandan-infused dishes, from mochi egg tarts to cronuts, have started popping up across cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Keri Matwick, a senior lecturer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who researches food and language, says that there’s been a rise of interest in Asian baking in the US, including desserts flavored by ingredients like matcha, coconut and ube — a purple yam from the Philippines.

Matcha, a Japanese green tea that has been incorporated into everything from tiramisu to cupcakes to banana pudding, has become so popular that some tea sellers in Japan are warning of an impending shortage.

Now, it might be pandan’s turn to go global. “Matcha has already set that precedent of something green is okay,” says Matwick. “I think (pandan is) starting to emerge as more of a star than it ever has before.”

№ 785. "Franciscus"

Pope Francis, who rose from modest means in Argentina to become the first Jesuit and Latin American pontiff, who clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church, and who spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet, died on Monday at the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta. He was 88.

The pope’s death was announced by the Vatican in a statement on X, a day after Francis appeared in his wheelchair to bless the faithful in St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday. The cause of death was a stroke followed by a coma and irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse, the Vatican said.

Throughout his 12-year papacy, Francis was a change agent, having inherited a Vatican in disarray in 2013 after the stunning resignation of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, a standard-bearer of Roman Catholic conservatism.

Francis steadily steered the church in another direction, restocking its leadership with a diverse array of bishops who shared his pastoral, welcoming approach as he sought to open up the church. Many rank-and-file Catholics approved, believing that the church had become inward-looking and distant from ordinary people.

Francis reached out to migrants, the poor and the destitute, to victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy members, and to alienated gay Catholics. He traveled to often-forgotten and far-flung countries and sought to improve relations with an antagonistic Chinese government, Muslim clerics and leaders from across the fragmented Christian world.

After some early stumbles, he took strong steps to address a clerical sex abuse crisis that had become an existential threat to the church. He adopted new rules to hold top religious leaders, including bishops, accountable if they committed sexual abuse or covered it up, though he did not impose the level of transparency or civil reporting obligations that many advocates demanded.

In his final years, slowed by a bad knee, intestinal surgery and respiratory ailments that sapped his breath and voice, Francis used a cane and then a wheelchair, seemingly a diminished figure. But that was a misleading impression. He continued to travel widely, focusing on exploited and war-torn parts of Africa, where he excoriated modern-day colonizers and sought peace in South Sudan.

His insistence on shaking up the status quo earned him no shortage of enemies. He demoted conservatives in Vatican offices, restricted the use of the old Latin Mass dear to traditionalists, opened influential meetings of bishops to laypeople, including women, allowed priests to bless same-sex couples and made clear that transgender people could be godparents and that their children could be baptized.

He also refused to endorse calls to deny communion to Catholic politicians supportive of abortion rights, including when he was president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said Francis had called him a “good Catholic.”

His avuncular charm and easy smile belied his reputation inside the Vatican as a steely — his opponents said ruthless — administrator as he brought greater transparency to church finances and overhauled the Vatican’s bureaucracy.

The traditional Italian power bases of the Vatican grew frustrated with his purposefully unpredictable governing style, which relied on a small group of confidants, many of them Jesuits like himself, and his own gut.

Conservative Catholics accused him of diluting church teachings and never stopped rallying against him. Simmering dissent periodically exploded into view in almost medieval fashion, with talk of schisms and heresy.

But Francis also disappointed many liberals, who hoped that he might introduce progressive policies. His openness to frank discussion gave oxygen to debates about long-taboo subjects, including priestly celibacy, communion for divorced and remarried people, and greater roles for women in the church. While he opened doors to talking about such issues, he tended to balk at making major decisions.

“We are often chained like Peter in the prison of habit,” he said of the church in 2022 in a speech in St. Peter’s Basilica. “Scared by change and tied to the chain of our customs.”

№ 784. Solvitur Ambulando

 "It is solved by walking." the problem can be solved by a practical demonstration referring to Diogenes' response to the claim that motion is unreal by getting up and walking.

№ 783. Himala

№ 782. Science: Heart Regeneration

 

№ 781. Geopolitics and Exit Strategies 3

Geographic Guide - Greenland

№ 780. The Long Now

 

Longnow

№ 779. Hey stupid, what about the Philippine Economy!

Tribune

Bite Back

Politics as entertainment is precisely just that. Popcorn. Sleight of hand to trick our attention. What about our economy? The country now is glued to Tiktok, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram all of which generate and spread political memes, soundbites and daily doses of entertainment. What is happening to our PhilHealth, SSS, Maharlika Sovereign Fund, per capita GDP, inflation, ad infinitum?

"Bread and circuses" ("bread and games") panem et circenses. 

Meanwhile who is minding the economy? Where are we headed?

Next season, Midterm Elections. After that, Impeachment. Meanwhile quo vadis, Philippines?

New York Times

Why Do We Equate Kindness with Leadership?

Reuters