Meal in the City: Cake and Ice Cream at the Office

Here is a Meal in the City post that's quite a bit different from all the rest. There was a recent birthday celebration at the office, and as is custom here in the Philippines, he treated those of us who were in at that time to something to eat.

(The custom strikes me as somewhat hobbit-y, since hobbits prefer to give away gifts on their birthdays as well as spread out an even more lavish meal or two. But in other parts of the world, it's the celebrant who gets treated to a meal.

Well, we do that too; we just expect the one with the birthday to also share his happiness, usually via sharing food.)

Anyway, for this particular treat, the celebrant brought in two of the things without which no birthday is really complete: cake and ice cream.



Sorry it's kind of blurry; I took the picture from my mobile phone. This is my portion of the birthday treat: I piled together in a small bowl some cookies-and-cream ice cream and a slice of chocolate roll.

Ice cream's really popular here and the types run the gamut: the various companies put out all sorts of types like sherbet, fruit-based, low-fat, low-sugar, etc. There are some small manufacturers that specialize in gelato; lots of Japanese and Korean mom-and-pop stores import their native brands.

And then there's the so-called "dirty" ice cream. Actually that's a misnomer; when we were kids our parents would try to dissuade us from eating it by saying it's unsanitary or full of microbes. Right, which only made us want it more since it was now microbe-rich forbidden fruit. Anyway, sorbetes is hawked in the streets from carts, which probably contributed to parental nightmares of GI distress, but it's still good. And they still do a roaring trade.

I wonder what I'll be bringing in for my own birthday, which is coming soon-ish.