Sweet Success

Our career paths lead to many exciting places, but few of us have paths paved with – or caked in – sugar.

Sisters Penk Ching and Shen Ratilla of Pastry Bin are sunny and cheerful women – perhaps, because they cannot help it. The work of their hands is sugar, a hint of spice, and most definitely, everything nice.

Penk and Shen started as hobbyists. In fact, they still work from their house in Quezon City with a crew that includes former maids and wives of former drivers, whom they have trained to be world-class bakers and cake decorators. Penk and Shen started by baking brownies and selling them to friends and relatives. Their only training in baking, in fact, came from their Home Economics classes at the St. Joseph’s College in Quezon City. What Penk trained for at the Arthur D. Little Management Institute in Boston was Business Management, following that up with a post-graduate course in Economics at Columbia University in New York.

Penk was hired by the United Nations, but her career as an international diplomat took a different turn when the UN assigned her to Sri Lanka, which was then in the midst of a civil war. Her father put his foot down. So back to Manila Penk went. Diplomacy’s loss was many a debutante and bride’s gain.

For Penk and her sister Shen have become the byword in fondant cakes among Manila’s crème de la crème.

Name a society wedding, and most likely, the wedding cake was baked – nay, built – by the sisters. I say built because most cakes aren’t only a delicious concoction of flour, sugar and shortening. They’re mini architectural marvels. Edible, of course.

Penk and Shen baked the wedding cakes of the three most recent presidential weddings: Jackie Ejercito and Beaver Lopez in 1999, Mikey Arroyo and Angela Montenegro in 2002 and Dato Arroyo and Kakai Manotoc in 2003. They also did the elegant wedding cake of Fernando Zobel and Kit Silverio in 1994.

Penk delivers her cakes far and wide – as far as Dubai to a member of Arab royalty. Penk and her precious cargo (a towering cake with blinking lights) were flown to Dubai, and both arrived in one piece, thanks to the very efficient airline that flew them.

Once, however, for a wedding in Hong Kong, the cakes were treated by an airline as luggage and Penk stood horrified by the conveyor belt when she saw the cakes’ containers do somersaults. When she reached her hotel room, her worst fears were confirmed: the cakes looked like they survived an Intensity 10 earthquake. So Penk spent the entire night reapplying the fondant icing to the cakes (whose base survived the assault!) and the giveaways. But she delivered, as always.

In fact, Penk believes that their integrity is the secret to the sisters’ sweet success.

"What you commit is what you give," she smiles. (During peak wedding season, the sisters deliver as many as five cakes a day!).

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A cake, says wedding coordinator Rita Neri, is really the focal point of any celebration – whether it’s a baby’s first birthday, a debut, or a golden wedding anniversary. The highlight of any surprise birthday party is when when the lights are dimmed and the cake is wheeled into the room. Souvenir photographs invariably have the cake as backdrop. It makes for the best photo ops.

Thus, cakes have evolved from simply being desserts to being symbols of the celebration itself.

Realizing the growing sophistication of Filipinos where food is concerned, Penk and Shen took cake decorating classes with the renowned Avelina Florendo and Heny Sison. They put up Pastry Bin in 1986, exactly 20 years ago, and never looked back.

On May 31, Penk and Shen (believe it or not, those are their real names!) will launch their first coffee table book "Caked in Sugar" at The Peninsula Manila. The book, with photographs by Chester Ong and Claudine Sia, looks delicious enough to eat, believe you me.

Truly, success is sweet – especially when you can really taste it!

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