Sweet Charlotte

IMG_2735.JPG
Originally uploaded by margauxlicious.

Just look at the detail on that cake. SIM didn't show a picture of it, instead used a picture of the strawberry version of this in last Sunday's feature.

---

MENU
Treat or treat!
By Margaux Salcedo
Inquirer
Last updated 04:59am (Mla time) 10/28/2007
MANILA, Philippines - Yay, it’s Halloween again!

This has got to be the best party time of the year, the following day’s solemnities eclipsed by the ecstatic spastic festivities of Halloween. Village kids will be roaming the streets again as vampires, witches or superheroes screaming “Trick or Treat!” while party people will be hopping around clubs as Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, James Bond. Last year my friends and I went out as the cast of “OK Ka, Fairy Ko,” yours truly a proud Ina Magenta. This year I think I’ll go as... hmmm, Bella Flores!

But while I’m having my eyebrows dyed into those of Bella Flores, let me tell you about another Bella, one who’s not so cruel, and evil in a different way. Her name is Sweet Bella and she is the Bella of the ball for ’07!

At the risk of sounding lesbo, let me tell you how we met. She stood across the room, dressed to the nines. She was standing in gorgeous glass slippers, the luminous light from underneath and around accenting the beauty of her face. She was so beautifully coiffed that she managed to upstage the most beautiful lady of all time, Imelda Marcos, who was also in the room that night. Against all willpower, I found myself drawn and making my way to her, holding my breath and doing all I could to contain my excitement. “I’m Sweet Bella,” she whispered when I got to where she stood, smiling at me with a calm confidence that melted my heart. I wanted all of her.

But I could only afford three. “Miss, pabili ng tatlo.” (Three, please.)

This was at the Pink Kitchen, a food festival at the Rockwell Tent organized by the I Can Serve Foundation, and where Cristina Santiago-Rivera, pastry chef, presented a dessert bar that goes by the name Sweet Bella, to showcase her cakes.

Sweet Bella is not a cake shop. You either request Sweet Bella to set up a dessert bar for you or call their hotline for a delivery of individual cakes and truffles.

Let me tell you about this sweetheart called a Dessert Bar. Think hotel dessert bar. Think Circles and Spiral dessert buffet. You know, that section where they usually have that gorgeous chocolate fountain and seductive line up of desserts? That’s what Sweet Bella is all about. The glass slippers I was referring to earlier are the glass plates that hold the cakes. And Chef Cristina has perfected the art of presentation such that even the lighting plays a role in the display; the glass stands are lit from underneath. So should you contract Sweet Bella for your wedding or party, you can expect a long dessert table with a sinfully sumptuous spread for your guests. If you have a theme, like Halloween or, say, a White Christmas, the presentation can also be made to match it.

But it is just that—an indulgence. Chef Cristina’s 8-inch cakes, which are the only ones available by the piece, are priced at P900 on average, over twice the price of regular cakes. A bar package may run anywhere between P18,000 for around 300 cakelets to P50,000 for almost a thousand cakelets. (A “cakelet” is a small version of a real 8-inch cake, as they offer it in shops like Bizu nowadays. This is usually less than 5 inches in diameter).

Why is it so expensive? I asked. After all, pain in the pocket is not always a masochistic preference, even for the most fanatical foodie. “We really use the best ingredients and we don’t scrimp on anything. You will notice that the chocolate and nuts in the cakes are very generous and the ingredients are of top quality. The Belgian chocolates alone are really expensive,” explains Chef Cristina. It was an answer I’d heard before so the frugal foodie in me remained skeptical, partly because I have no party to throw in the near future to justify spending that much, but mostly because I would rather just order those individual cakes for myself! (At Pink Kitchen, Sweet Bella offered cakelets that went for about P100 each. And to think we were eating “for charity”!)

Yet all skepticism was lost the following day when I opened my boxes of Chocolatta and Mango Charlotte. In a heartbeat, it was goodbye savings, hello Sweet Bella!

The Chocolatta, a basic chocolate cake, is just gorgeous. Its coating of chocolate is so rich it looks glazed (Sweet Bella describes it as a chocolate glass). You can almost see your reflection on it. Resting on the cake is a giant white chocolate butterfly amidst swirls of dark chocolate. When you dig your knife in for a slice, you notice that the layers of chocolate are just as Chef Cristina described it—generous. The body of the cake, more moist than crumbly ("a good chocolate cake must be moist!” emphasizes Cristina), sandwiches an inch of chocolate ganache that is so luxurious you must take it all in slowly. It’s like eating chocolate cake and Lindt dark chocolate truffles at the same time.

Chocolate lover that I am, however, I was even more amazed at the Mango Charlotte. Charlotte is just pretty. She has white icing all over and daintily designed mango slices on top. Charlotte’s Web crossed my head when I saw the spiral of mangoes, but Chef Cristina says there is no significant story to the name, only that the cake uses a family recipe that she recalls her mom, Purita Santiago, using since Cristina was only five. (Her father, by the way, is Melo Santiago of Melo’s. Cristina was Melo’s pastry chef before she created Sweet Bella.)

The cake was so pretty I couldn’t bring myself to slice it. But I finally found the courage and served myself and my mother, my ever reliable eating companion. Let me tell you in all honesty and with no exaggeration whatsoever that after our first bite, we just stopped talking. We were possessed by the cake! My mom was adorable to watch. She took a bite, then her face went blank, like she stopped breathing, then when she came to she exhaled a very ladylike “mmmm!” almost like she just discovered... Jimmy Choo shoes.

Here’s a taste of Charlotte, which also comes in Strawberry. Your tongue is greeted by the Chantilly cream, a vanilla-flavored whipped cream which, true to habit, is lathered on generously. When you bite into it, your teeth will sink into the gentle crunchiness of a cashew-flavored crust. Then when you chew, your tongue will party with the pristine sweetness of the cream and the more earthy sweetness of the mango. While your tongue savors this play on taste, made even more interesting by the lingering cashew flavor, the experience is taken to another level with the play on texture, the delicate crunch juxtaposed against the silky whipped cream and the cool slide of mango. If you eat it like a child, from the outside, you might find it too sweet and rich because the cake wears this cream like sheep wear fleece. But if you stay within the boundaries of cake central, where crunch remains abundant, sweet hits the precise note, muted by the cashew flavoring, and well within the realm of “just perfect.”

“It’s a lot of hard work,” Chef Cristina says when asked how it’s done. “It’s really just the basics, but we work on presentation and in making sure that the cakes come out exactly as we want them to taste.” She gets inspiration from travel and books and is not in a rush to go commercial, emphasizing the amount of work they put into each cake. The idea of a Sweet Bella store is in mind but far from being in the works just now.

So in the meantime, we’ll have to call to order. But I must say as a last note that this Mango Charlotte is simply something you must try while you can still scream “Trick or Treat!” Heaven may be everything it promises to be, but I do believe even the most pious angel would fall for this seductive Sweet Bella!

Sweet Bella. 1730 Banyan Street, Dasmariñas Village, Makati. Tel. 844-0680 or 844-9905, Mobile no. 0928-502-5027.