Maja Blanca Makes Me Feel at Home Living in Timaru
I’ve made this popular Filipino dessert called ‘Maja Blanca’.
It is a creamy coconut pudding made of coconut milk or cream, condensed or evaporated milk, sugar, and cornstarch, in its basic form.
Some variations include adding toasted and grounded peanuts, or sweet corn kernels, and a topping of “latik.”
Latik is a golden-brown aromatic reduction of coconut milk when coconut milk is cooked down for a period of time, a sort of by-product of coconut oil and used as a garnish in some Filipino desserts like Maja Blanca.
I used toasted desiccated coconut in this recipe for simplicity and ease. It has quite the same effect as using ‘latik.’
Living in Timaru, I don’t feel deprived of my favourite Filipino dishes because I can make them anytime. The ingredients I need are available and accessible in this beautiful New Zealand city.
Timaru offers several supermarkets with aisles for international products, fresh produce shops, seafood shops, butchery, special items or ethnic shops to access the ingredients you need.
The best thing about it is that everything is just within five to ten minutes drive with relatively very light to medium traffic even at rush hours.
Having lived in a busy city in the Philippines, I know how stressful it is to be in bumper-to-bumper traffic, where a trip to a supermarket could take an hour or more.
Timaru is an ideal place to raise a family, a place that offers work and life balance, a beautiful place with the coast at the eastern side and the beautiful hills and snow-capped mountains on the western side.
Seeing my family and friends enjoying the Maja Blanca (and other Filipino dishes) that I created makes me feel at home living in Timaru. 🙂
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