The quarantine/lockdown situation here in our country, the Philippines is making me all curious and creative of the many things we can do while we stay at home. Recently, I have been into gardening and cooking with my kid, my nephews, and nieces. We have 5 kids in the house, well, they are not really kids, I am talking about people younger than me with age ranging from 9-21 years old.
We have been exploring cooking our own foods including sweet treats and snacks. Yesterday, we made polvorons. Polvoron is a Filipino shortbread made of toasted flour, powdered milk, sugar, and melted butter or margarine. It is easy to make, you just toast the flour for about 15 minutes, continually stirring for the flour not to get burned. After it has that nice smell of cooked toasted flour, you transfer to a bowl and mix the other dry ingredients, the powdered milk, and the sugar. After this, pour the melted butter to bind all the ingredients. Get a polvoron mold and press it on the mixture to make uniform circles of this sweet powdered polvoron and wrap them in a thin cellophane. Others use colorful cellophanes, but we did not have that around, we had a transparent one.
It was easy to cook but it was not easy to wrap. It was difficult to wrap because it breaks with a little pressure, but then it was all worth it because we made something for ourselves and it was fun being hands-on with making our own food. We were able to make 50 pieces of polvorons and this could probably last a week. We might make another batch of these to give away to our aunts and our neighbors. This activity was worthwhile and definitely helped combat our boredom.