Dessert Friday: biko

For all of VeganMoFo, each Friday in October will be Dessert Friday! This kicks off our themed weekends: Dessert Friday, Saturday Snack, and Sunday Brunch. (I resisted being cutesy and calling them "Saturday Snackday" and "Sunday Brunchday" but it took a lot of willpower, you guys.)

Today's dessert is biko, a Filipino street food. It's easy, foolproof, and gluten-free. The recipe I used came from the Ivory Hut blog, where the author shares a cute story about how as a kid she used to call her mother every day after school asking her to pick up some biko on the way home from work. While I was lucky enough to have a fantastic baker as a mother, I still sorta wish I grew up in a place where this delicious dessert was readily available!

Biko consists of coconut rice baked with a coconut cream and sugar topping that caramelizes as it cooks. There are only 3-4 ingredients. AND IT IS DELICIOUS. I am a rice fanatic and a big fan of coconut, so it was sort of my perfect dessert. After you combine cooked rice and coconut-sugar mixture, you bake it for 60-90 minutes I was afraid of overcooking it, so I pulled it out after 60 mins, but I should have left it in for the full 90--mine was slightly undercooked. But all "undercooked" in this case meant is that it didn't caramelize all the way down, so it was a little moister and more apt to fall apart than it would have been otherwise. It was still delicious and well received by my dinner guests, one of whom was gluten-free. Foolproof!

I even found it simple and healthy enough to eat for breakfast over the next couple days, topped with banana slices. I mean, yeah, it's sweet, but so are the majority of breakfast cereals, right? Right.