Mandaue's giant bibingka unveiled

CEBU, Philippines - After a month-long preparation, Mandaue City finally presented its biggest bibingka to Mandauehanons last night.

The city wants to beat the current Guiness World Record being held by South Korea for the largest rice cake, but officials were quick to state that they consider bibingka as rice bread because it is cooked with yeast.

The bibingka which was presented yesterday at the Mandaue City Sports Complex and Cultural Center covers most of the basketball court.

City tourism officer Louella Cabanero yesterday said that the huge bibingka, made up mostly of smaller bibingka squares, measures 50 meters in diameter.

Cabanero said that the preparation and cooking of the said bibingka was closely supervised by the Mayol Family, known to be the best bibingka makers in the city.

Christine Mayol Cortes, part of the sixth generation of the Mayol family that still makes bibingka, brought her mother Cristina Cortes, her uncle Manuel Mayol and some members of the Mayol clan to help supervise the preparation.

Cooking the biggest bibingka took the city 24 hours with more than 500 workers helping, most of them teachers and students.

As some workers squeezed milk from fresh coconut milk, others prepared the bibingka mixture while others poured these into pans lined with banana leaves.

In all 61 sacks of rice, 60 sacks of sugar and 13,500 coconuts were used.

The ingredients were cooked using 700 sacks of coconut husks and augmented with seven sacks of charcoal.

From the initial P500,000 budget, Cabanero said that the budget was trimmed down after businessmen in the city donated most of the ingredients to be used in the cooking.

She said three rice traders also donated the 61 sacks of rice while Ong King-King donated the 60 sacks of sugar. The bibingka was cooked in improvised stoves made from barrels donated by San Miguel Corp., Ginebra and International Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Cooking utensils were borrowed from the Department of Education while banana leaves came from the city’s 27 barangays.

Mayor Jonas Cortes said that the activity itself was beyond tourism as it reflects the dedication and perseverance of the Mandauehanons despite all adversities. He said he wants to remind the young generation of the culture and livelihood of their ancestors.

Manuel Mayol said that the bibingka was their parents’ means of livelihood, he said by selling it their parents were able to send their eight siblings to school.

Cortes said that the Bibingkahan sa Mandaue will now be an annual activity in the city even if it will no longer be as big as what was presented this year.

He adds that once the old public market will be vacated by vendors who will be relocated to the new public market behind the Sports Complex, the old public market will be used as a one-stop shop for local and foreign tourists who want to buy the city's best known delicacies and products.

During the Mass for the presentation, former Cebu archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal told Mandauehanons to take care of their families just like how St. Joseph, Mandaue’s Patron Saint, took care of Mary and Jesus.

Vidal said that The Holy Family lives in the homes where husbands do not batter the wives, do not drink and do not gamble and homes where the wives are not naggers, backbiters and indolent.

He added that St. Joseph, Mary and Jesus reside in the homes where couples know how to distinguish between good and evil like in the use of self-control or contraceptives in family planning.

“Self-control is a blessing from the Holy Spirit. If you have self-control as a couple, you do not need to use contraceptives. Contraceptives are strongly forbidden in the Catholic Church because it cannot help in practicing self-discipline,” Vidal said.

“If the effect will be separated from the cause, the person will lose self-discipline. If the person loses self-discipline, he will never know how to choose the good and reject the evil,” he added.

Vidal said that the same in using contraceptives, the youth will no longer think of the consequences because they will think there is nothing wrong with what they are doing.

The same with husbands who will find cheating against their wives easy because they will lose the conscience to think that what they are doing is wrong. – with Jessica Ann R. Pareja/BRP (FREEMAN)