Out of Print

Abi Balingit is on the Rise

by Liz Yap 
Photos courtesy of Abi Balingit

The recipe developer and cookbook author talks about the struggles of getting published, being present, and why self-expression to her is a form of survival.

Necessity is the mother of invention, especially when you’re a 17-hour flight away from the motherland. Abi Balingit has made ube jam from ube-flavored Oishi Pillows, used chopped Curly Tops for chocolate rugelach, combined calamansi and patis in shortbread.

The self-taught Filipino-American baker has become known for taking the familiar and transforming it in delightfully clever, brilliantly surprising ways. Sharing the recipes on her blog, The Dusky Kitchen, and creating pasalubong pastry boxes to raise funds during the pandemic led to her first cookbook, Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed. A halo-halo baked Alaska graces the cover, but it’s arguably Abi’s adobo chocolate chip cookies that have become emblematic of her freewheeling, Willy Wonka mind and her flair for sweet reimagination.

Building on the framework of the beloved chocolate chip cookie recipe, she introduces the flavors of adobo to bring about an unexpectedly savory, caramel depth. Bay leaves are steeped in brown butter, soy sauce added to the batter for enhanced umami, and apple cider vinegar mixed in to activate the baking soda. Crushed pink peppercorns are sprinkled on top for a bright, fruity flourish. It’s art. It’s science. It’s indescribably delicious.

Eleven years later, it’s this same mixer that Abi uses in her Brooklyn apartment, having taken it with her on a cross-country flight from SFO to JFK, wrapping it with sweaters for padding and packing all 26 pounds of it in a duffel bag. For her, it’s a poignant reminder of her parents’ support and the validation of feeling seen. “I always think about my parents every time I use my mixer,” she says. “I’m really grateful they saw that baking was important to me.”

The mixer is the workhorse that has seen her through the start of her blog, through the tireless baking of scaled-up batches for her pasalubong boxes, through recipe development for her cookbook. Abi’s come a long way from that California kitchen, now comfortable enough with the form to know when and how to diverge and deviate. What if you make marshmallow treats with toasted pinipig and furikake on top? What if you combine spicy bagoong and sweet caramel? What if you add MSG to brownie batter? What if you cook down some melon and cover it with a layer of chicharon crumble? What if, what if.

“There are such small, simple changes you can make that end up creating something better than the sum of their parts,” she says. “Your palate changes and you change as you get older, and you build on your skills to create something new.” There’s one thing that has remained constant in what she looks for in a dessert, however: “My insatiable desire for new combinations of sweet, salty, savory, sour, and umami,” she writes in Mayumu.

“Life is so short,” she says. “I value self-expression as a form of survival.”

Abi’s approach to recipe development reflects her personal style: vibrant, eclectic, maximalist. To celebrate the publication of the book, she got tooth gems that spelled out MAYUMU; the letters gradually fell off until only “YUM” remained, which felt appropriate. On the day she talks to Out of Print, her hair is bleached white with green and yellow streaks, a statement all on their own. She has an impressive collection of kitschy, wildly elaborate earrings, many of which are (unsurprisingly) food-related. Her aesthetic is a mix of street and sweet, true to herself. Abi and her desserts are always dressed for the occasion.

“Life is so short,” she says. “I value self-expression as a form of survival.” In the same way dressing up is an opportunity to try on a new style or be a different person for a day, the recipes she creates can satisfy whatever she happens to have a craving for. She dresses how she feels, cooks that way too. Inspiration is everywhere; it’s all interconnected. “Music is art, fashion is art, food is art. All those ideas in my head just go together in tandem, even when I least expect it. Sometimes songs can trigger memories, sometimes what you wear inspires what you bake.”

In food as in fashion, the fun is always in seeing what happens when you put different elements together. Wandering the aisles of any grocery store often sparks ideas. “I picked up a bag of Korean turtle chips last week and I really wanted to make something with it,” she says, almost thinking out loud. “I can see it being used in so many ways. I did a SkyFlakes cracker crust in the book for the Pacific Beach Pie recipe. I could use it to make a similar crust but with a custard… My brain just works in a way where sometimes it’s one ingredient that sparks ideas and makes me think, I can build off this.”

It was a lightning bolt of an idea that fortuitously kicked off Abi’s cookbook journey. “I MADE LAO GAN MA SPICY CHILI CRISP CUPCAKES,” she tweeted with her usual ebullience. It was September 2020, a month into the baking blog she’d started during the pandemic. Her inaugural post featured ube crinkle cookies, something of a standard-bearer. But she’d already begun to explore the fun and funky flavor combinations that would become her trademark, sharing a recipe for pork floss and white miso caramel brownies that same month.

It’s not where you take things from, they say; it’s where you take them to. The Lao Gan Ma cupcakes were created in the same vein: a burnt sugar cake base with rosettes of frosting on top, crowned with chili crisp and a sprinkle of five-spice peanut brittle that she spiked with black Chinkiang vinegar. The moment she thought of combining all these flavors, “I felt something like Jimmy Neutron having a brain blast.”

The tweet caught the attention of a literary agent, Emmy Nordstrom Higdon, who slid into Abi’s DMs to ask if she’d ever thought about writing a cookbook. Abi hadn’t considered that all of this might possibly lead to becoming a published author. But again, there was that question: what if?

The Dusky Kitchen had its genesis during a life-changing trip to the Philippines over the Christmas holidays in 2019. The first and last time Abi had gone was in 2000, when she was five years old and still too young to understand what it all meant. Visiting as a child and then returning as a full-fledged adult two decades later was like going from black and white to full color. While her parents kept in constant touch with relatives back home, and the internet and social media certainly made it easier, being present was dramatically different. She had a million questions for her cousins, curious about everything from the political climate to everyday life. “I wanted to know what they’re dealing with and what’s happening there, from their point of view, because it’s been so long since I’ve been back.”

“So much of that trip changed my relationship not just with family but also with food.” She found herself rediscovering things she’d grown up with and savoring everything she had the opportunity to try, from brazo de Mercedes with salted duck egg yolks to freshly picked kamias from a tree in her tita’s backyard. She grew up loving the turrones de casoy that relatives would often bring back from their own trips to the Philippines; now it was her turn to buy pasalubong for her family and friends. “It felt very full circle to come back.”

Invigorated and inspired by what she’d experienced and tasted in Pampanga, Palawan, Batangas, and Manila, Abi was determined to channel it into baking and exploring Filipino ingredients once she was back in Brooklyn. Her go-to baking recipes had usually been very American—Western-style desserts of the cheesecake variety, the usual suspects—but there was a whole other universe of flavors to bring into the fold. And as a child of the internet, she wanted to document it all in a blog. On the flight back to New York from Manila, she came up with the name The Dusky Kitchen, a reference to baking in the early evenings after work. The domain was acquired, social media handles registered.

And then life got in the way.

A few months after returning home, the pandemic hit. “The reality of living in a diaspora was the uncertainty of when you’d see your family again,” she writes in Mayumu. With her relatives scattered across the country and across the globe—her parents and sisters all in California, and herself in New York—there was always a certain loneliness for the familiarity and comfort of home. This was true even before COVID, but had a different ache to it in those months when no one knew if or when things would ever go back to the way they were.

“I was missing my family so much, and having this nostalgia for Filipino flavors and the cuisine itself,” she says. She finally published her first blog post in August 2020, and kept up a regular cadence for the months that followed. Missing Jollibee, she shared her take on the beloved fast food chain’s peach mango pies. She made strawberry polvoron, flavored with freeze-dried berries that she blitzed into powder. Ube puto with sharp cheddar on top, inspired by childhood visits to Goldilocks. Horchata bibingka, a nod to the Latinx flavors she grew up with in California. The blog and its recipes became a new way to connect with her family and her heritage, in a way that was uniquely Abi.

Horchata Bibingka

Inspired by fellow bakers who were raising funds through bake sales across the country, Abi wanted to make a difference as well. She put together pasalubong treat boxes with her homemade pastries and sweets, with proceeds benefiting organizations in New York and in the Philippines, and began taking orders online. The 48 boxes sold out in a week and set in motion a series of pop-ups and pasalubong drops.

Now Abi unexpectedly found herself writing a cookbook proposal and meeting with editors to see who might be interested in publishing it. “I felt like Cinderella,” she says about the whirlwind of it all. “It came in waves. Is this really happening? Is this my life?” She didn’t know the journey it would take her on then, the emotional rollercoaster of getting from proposal to published book—the hard work that goes on behind the scenes of fulfilling a dream, the invisible toll.

For a first-time author, the publishing industry can be incredibly brutal. “You’re not Ina Garten, you’re not Martha Stewart with dozens of cookbooks behind your name for them to say, yes, this is gonna be a great idea.” The intersection of art and business is a lonely, unforgiving place. It’s particularly harsh for creatives who are just starting out and trying to prove they have what it takes.

“What’s frustrating about any industry, especially creative industries where you want to get your foot in the door, is that people will say you don’t have enough experience,” she says. “But I just want experience, and I’m trying to get experience. There’s a lot of pushback sometimes, especially with people of color, women of color, and people who don’t have the luxuries of certain connections to the industry that they can leverage.”

“You’re not Ina Garten, you’re not Martha Stewart with dozens of cookbooks behind your name for them to say, yes, this is gonna be a great idea.”

Despite being told by several editors that a Filipino-American dessert cookbook was potentially too niche, Abi had faith in her vision of what she wanted to bring to life. It was gratifying to have people by her side who believed in it, too. Her agent Emmy’s unwavering support was invaluable. “She’d tell me, no matter what, even if you don’t make it through this round of submissions and all editors will say no, then we’ll do it again. We’re gonna tweak the proposal, we’re gonna make it better.”

“Having people believe in you, to believe that you can write a book, it really gives you a lot of confidence to do anything you want to do,” she says. “Yeah, I was told no by a lot of editors, but being told yes by some people—wow, it really does change the way you see yourself for the better. Even when people say no to you again or are mean to you or give you criticism that isn’t great, you still get something out of it. And one person still thinks I’m great. So that’s good, you just keep going with that.”

Abi landed a cookbook deal in early 2022, a lesson in perseverance as much as it was an exercise in letting go. In any creative endeavor, you do the best you can and let the chips fall where they may. “I somehow overcame a lot of obstacles, and I found that, at least for my experience, as long as you have a really strong point of view, and as long as you have an idea that you really believe in, I think that you can get it published,” she says. “But in what way that happens—sometimes it can take years, sometimes it can take a couple of months. Sometimes I was caught up about needing to get this done now, now, now. But you don’t really know. Sometimes it won’t. I’m really glad it worked out in my favor... but you know, you can’t control all those things. I feel really good about the way it happened. But I also felt good about the way that I thought about it if it didn’t happen that way.”


Turon Linzer Cookies

The experience also strengthened her belief in herself and what she can do, despite prevailing external expectations. “Sometimes you have impostor syndrome, like, ‘Am I really a baker if I didn’t go to pastry school, if I don’t have this degree?’ I think that less and less as I keep doing what I’m doing and I keep baking more. There’s a lot to say about people who are just doing what they’re doing in their own way, on their own path. No one’s teaching you how to do it, there’s no one telling you that this is how you should do it. Because whenever you’re self-taught, you’re like, okay, I’ll just figure it out. And that’s how the whole cookbook went as well.”

She had four months to develop 75 recipes for the book on top of her full-time job in marketing, a true balancing act for someone who never does anything half-baked. What made it easier was knowing what she wanted to achieve: recipes that brought something new to the table yet still felt true to herself. While she always enjoyed finding ways to give traditional recipes a unique twist, she also sought to make readers feel more comfortable making Filipino desserts at home. “You want people to be able to make it themselves, but at the same time, you want them to come away with the lesson that baking isn’t that hard. Desserts don’t always have to be that hard.”

The Taho Panna Cotta recipe in the book was born out of Abi’s love for the dessert and a desire to translate its flavors in another way. A panna cotta retains the custard elements of taho, but gives you a different texture and temperature. True to form, she thought about the presentation as well. The recipe involves pouring the panna cotta mix into glasses tilted at a 45-degree angle, set in a kitchen towel-lined pan. Once it sets in the refrigerator, it creates a striking, diagonal yin-yang effect with the custard and arnibal on top—because simply having two horizontal layers would have been too boring.

Rainbow Fruit Polvoron

Some of Abi’s favorite recipes in the book are the ones that can be used for different desserts as well as on their own. Her Twinkie-inspired recipe for marshmallow-filled mamon has the same sponge cake base as the halo-halo baked Alaska that’s on the cover of the book. The bagoong caramels, individually wrapped in parchment, can be enjoyed as bite-sized candy. But they also do double-duty in the kare-kare cookies, squares of caramel placed on top of each piece so they melt into a spicy-sweet glaze. Pandesal is turned into tsokolate bread pudding. The caramelized banana and jackfruit jam is sandwiched between shortbread and dusted with powdered sugar for turon linzer cookies. “It’s interesting to see how one basic recipe can turn into something totally different.”


She always knew the cookbook would be titled Mayumu, the Kapampangan word for sweet—a nod to her parents, her roots, and her heritage. “Even though we’re all Filipino, we came from different provinces and speak different languages,” she says, wanting to shed light on other aspects of Filipino culture beyond Manila and beyond Tagalog. “The title itself sparks conversation, which is great.”

Mayumu is divided into five sections, representing different eras of her life so far: Pampanga, San Jose, Stockton, Berkeley, Brooklyn. Each chapter begins with an essay. Abi writes about growing up in “our own Filipino version of Full House” with her extended family, discovering a supportive Filipino-American community in college, taking a one-way flight to New York with “Empire State of Mind” on repeat, and finding her way back to baking. Taken all together, it unfolds like a coming-of-age story.

And it paints a beautiful picture of her family. Visiting the Philippines right before the pandemic, Abi realized it was more important than ever to take ownership of preserving her family’s traditions and culture. Her parents always had a special way of bringing generations of people together, no matter the distance and no matter the time. She felt she had a bigger role to play in keeping that going.

In the Balingit home, her family had always instilled in Abi a sense of pride about who she is. Still, she believes it takes active work on her part to preserve this. “I’m at a point in my family history where my parents are still so immediate to me, and their memories are still influencing what I think about being Filipino,” she says. “Without them, how do you carry it on for future generations?”

She knows she has a responsibility to keep these connections alive, and it’s something she wants to be even more intentional about. “My parents, my aunts and uncles, they won’t be here forever, unfortunately. There’s a sense of urgency to document our stories. So much of it is about family and getting older, and that’s what drove me to do what I’m doing now.”

In Mayumu, this dream comes alive. “The book was a huge part of learning about my family in a way that I hadn’t engaged with until recently, like my parents’ immigration stories. I’ve heard about them over time, I know the gist of them, I know the summary of what happened and why we’re here. But it was the first time I had really talked to them about it in depth, asking them, ‘Was it hard? How did you feel?’”

“These conversations don’t always happen naturally in our families and in our communities, because it can be painful to talk about, and I understand that. I’m really lucky that I wrote a book. It’s a cookbook, you’d think it’s all about food. But for me, so much of it was about intergenerational healing.”

The essays are the true heart of the cookbook. Abi writes about the start of her parents’ relationship (“My mom was head over heels for him because he looked like Gabby Concepcion”), their epistolary romance when her dad was working in Saudi Arabia and her mom was still in Pampanga, to their reunion in California where her dad had to apply for a visa three times in the span of nine months before he was accepted. There’s a particularly touching anecdote from her 2019 visit to the Philippines when, as they’re leaving for the airport to go back to America, her sister Argeli refuses to get inside the car because she doesn’t want to leave, and every single one of their relatives pretends to join Abi’s family in the van as a way to coax her inside.

“It’s so nice to be able to have our family history somewhere forever, and not just floating in memories. Everything about our history is so oral, and while oral traditions are important, it gets hard to keep together because everything is so nebulous.” Having these stories documented in the book, along with her own recipes, is priceless to Abi. “There are so few things in my life that I can hold physically and say, this is mine. This is a reflection of me.”

The five months since Mayumu was released have been a flurry of interviews and events for the author, but she’s had a lot of time to reflect on her journey to getting published. “The feeling of writing the book was a dream and a goal that I didn’t have until three years ago. It’s cool that it’s a reality now and it became a reality, because I didn't think that was possible for someone like me who had no connections in the publishing industry whatsoever.”

Kare-Kare Cookies

This is only Abi’s first book, but a world of opportunity has opened up for her. She wants to do the same for fellow creatives: uplifting and sharing people’s work in tandem with hers, and supporting others who are also in this space. In particular, she’s hopeful about the doors Mayumu can unlock for other Filipino cookbooks of all stripes and persuasions. “When I was writing my proposal, I was looking at Filipinx, Amboy, I Am A Filipino on the shelf, and thinking, yeah, there is space for my book on the shelf. There will always be more space on the shelf. I do hope that’s what people come away with—a book people can point to and say, this is one inflection point in Filipino food and there’s going to be a whole lot more down the line.”

Just as every author’s dream is for their books to become dog-eared and worn, seeing people from all over the world trying her recipes and reading her essays is immensely gratifying for Abi. “There’s something very special about it. I’ve always talked a lot about the internet and how much I love blogging, and all those things that live forever online. But there’s something different and special about physical things, like magazines and books. There’s something human about having something tangible. I’m very glad to have that in the form of Mayumu.”

What has also given the experience of writing the cookbook another dimension is meeting more Filipinos online or on the road at events for Mayumu. Growing up, Abi admired her dad’s uncanny ability to find fellow Filipinos anywhere and strike up a conversation with them. “I do feel more and more like him in a way. There’s something to learn from everyone’s experiences. We’re able to connect on many things without even having to explain it. In terms of heritage and culture and tradition and history, my past self knows there’s a lot more to uncover. I’m still learning. I’m still growing. It’s an exciting, exciting time.”

There’s nothing better than coming home, yet nothing more rewarding than the gift of a new perspective. In recipes and in life, Abi is at her most creative where the familiar and the unknown meet. “I continue to be humbled by the bigness of the world and what it has to offer,” she says. “But I'm always just really happy to see that the world feels smaller every day.”︎

Liz Yap is a former magazine editor, writer, and brand strategist based in New York.