Souvenir teas from friends

I took home a couple of pasalubong from friends who know I prefer tea over coffee. The green tea or matcha is from Kyoto. My mentor who is still active after officially retiring 5 years ago got me this after visiting his daughter who's family is based in Kyoto. Featured on the box is popular Japanese pitcher Shohei Ohtani. Green tea is one of those things I drink that brings back memories of living in Japan in the 1990s. Prior to that, I wasn't into tea. That changes when I tasted the really good ones, even the instant variety that we had stock at our laboratory in Yokohama.

The other one is from a colleague who is also my junior at university. He just got back from the US and Canada where he spent sometime during the break after getting his PhD diploma at Stanford. I haven't tried it yet but am curious about the taste of maple tea.

Green tea from Japan and Maple Tea from Canada

I haven't tried either but will probably have some soon as they wet season is here. These are perfect to warm the body during rainy days. 

- 

Cheese cupcakes from Burnt Sugar

There used to be a nice grocery store with a bakeshop along Katipunan just across from Miriam College. Shoppersville was already there when I first entered UP back in 1988. Fast forward to 2012 and I discovered it had a smaller branch in Antipolo; near where we decided to build our house after the experience of Typhoon Ondoy's floods.

Shoppersville was consumed by fire many years ago and their branch in Antipolo had to close, too.  They had opened a store in front of the burned building on a converted container. We thought that would last until they rebuilt the grocery but that too didn't last. Time went on and the pandemic hit a lot of business pretty bad. Recently though I learned their baking survived and they now have a commissary along Maginhawa near where we first resided temporarily about 26 years ago.

They now go by the name Burnt Sugar and the selections from their FB page shows they still have most of the products they offered before including our favorite cheese cupcakes, taisan and brownies. They usually post what's available for the day but you can order in advance for you to pick-up or have picked-up by a rider. They are very quick to reply and its easy to order and arrange for pick-up.

 

Our daughter doesn't know it but somehow she baked something like this when she started making cheese cupcakes. Kaya siguro may good memories the first time we indulged our daughter's creation?

A box of 12 cupcakes cost 320 pesos. Not bad for the quality and quantity.

I may be biased about my daughter's version of this cupcake being better (the ingredients are better) but there's some nostalgia about Shoppersville and their products. I will probably order some brownies soon. 

- 

Soap and childhood memories

Taking vacations in Iloilo during my childhood days, my aunts always took good care of us at our paternal home. Of course, there was always good, home-cooked meals. But this time I write about something a little different from the usual stories of food, relatives and friends, and going around. This is about something we use everyday - bath soap (trivial though it seems). I have a memory of one of my aunts justifying opening one of her imported soaps on the occasion of our vacation. She had many in her closet thanks to my cousins who were then based in the Middle East always sending her care packages. The packages usually have expensive cosmetics, lotions and soap for their mother who was at that time a public school teacher at the local elementary school. These were not so common brands at the time like - Dove, Ivory and the imported versions of Camay. There was also the imported version of Lifebuoy, which is how I learned about the product. 

Fast forward to the present and I still patronize products that I used back then. There's a certain nostalgia about the smell of Lifebuoy, for example, that I brings back memories of vacationing during my childhood years.

Lifebuoy soap has one of those distinct scents that's practically the same as the ones I used decades ago. The smell brings me back in time.

This is a Unilever product that's now manufactured in Indonesia.

 

We used a different brand soap at home at the time. I think it was usually Safeguard and at time Irish Spring (favored by Tatay). So it was somewhat refreshing to have a different soap for showers.