By Arlyn Osborne

Arlyn Osborne is an American-Filipino food writer who, if you’ve been hankering for a collection of Pinoy-inspired sweet recipes, totally read your mind. There’s not much else like her book Sugarcane around, described on the cover as ‘sweet recipes from my half-Filipino kitchen.”

Mostly, these aren’t straight Filipino dishes, they’re largely where she imposes traditional flavours and ingredient combos onto Western faves using Western techniques. So in her hands, a tiramisu features the expected coffee-soaked cake, but with a pandan and coconut-flavoured cream. Champorado, a Filipino sticky rice and chocolate porridge, is tizzed up with sour cherry sauce to become Black Forest Champorado. (And why, we find ourselves asking, didn’t we know about champorado before? It sounds amazing). Her mango sago custard gets an elegant, Frenchified brûlée topping. Bubble Tea Tart is like a classic baked custard pie but with molasses swirled in and a boba topping. Her baking leans on fruits like calamansi, rambutan, mango, pineapple, guava and kumquat, plus flavours like rose, coconut and lemongrass. And yes, there’s plenty of ube, as you’d expect… Banana Bread is marbled with it; Ube Milk Crinkles and Ube Coconut Cake are prettily purple. Maybe the most stupendous of Osborne’s ube creations is the Ube Cheese Pandesal, her take on a favourite Filipino crumb-dusted bread roll. She explains in the recipe intro how, during the pandemic, creative Filipino bakers ‘sheltering in place’ tinkered with the far plainer original, introducing loads of colourful, vibrant flavour options into the mix. This cheesy one, brightly coloured mauve and stuffed with sweet yam jam and America’s finest velveeta, is her contribution to a whole new generation of pandesal. 

In the book, the over 80 recipes are dispersed among chapters for Cakes, Cookies & Bars, Pies, Tarts & Crisps, Puddings, Custards & Jellies, Breads & Pastries, and Frozen Sweets. It’s a pretty comprehensive collection. Osborne (or her thoughtful publishers) have handily provided metric weight and measure conversions for ingredients; an American cup capacity is slightly less than ours so having grams and mls conversions ensures accuracy. It does lead to odd amounts though, like 113g of butter, 219g flour, and 48g of pearl tapioca, but we reckon you could round these things up a bit if you don’t have forensically accurate digital scales. Ours are only accurate to 2g, for example. Occasionally, she uses ingredients that might be impossible to source… passionfruit powder and guava concentrate spring to mind. Oh and the Velveeta too but hey. There’s always Chesdale as a viable substitute? We don’t pretend to understand Velveeta. Generally though, you’ll be able to whip up most of the goodies in this book relatively easily and if you’re a baking fanatic on the prowl for new and unexpected flavours, it’s one you should seriously consider.

Recipes from Sugarcane…