At the end of each school year, Margarita Manzke and her seven siblings piled into the family car in Manila, where her father ran a fish-sauce factory, to drive to her mother’s resort in Subic Bay, on the west coast of Luzon, about two hours away. They spent summers there, not swimming and sunbathing like other families on vacation from the city. Not bobbing down the waves on boogie boards, or falling asleep under umbrellas with books in one hand and drinks in the other. Even as a teenager, Manzke was an entrepreneur. And summertime, free from the structure of daily classes and homework, was for one thing, and one thing only: engaging in the sport of friendly competition with her brothers and sisters.
One summer, Manzke and her siblings learned to burn sugar to make the dark, sweet base for homemade sago at gulaman, the drink full of tapioca pearls and jellies. One of her brothers sold these chilled, at a prized location, to the sweaty, thirsty tourists that packed the beach. Big deal! Manzke paid a local butcher to slaughter three whole pigs and roast the meat so she could sell plates of crisp-skinned lechon to the same hungry beachgoers. When one of her sisters turned an empty cottage on the resort property into a makeshift bakery — a cache of sweets and layered cakes — Manzke leveled up, learning to make chocolate cakes filled with a soft custardy center and draw her own regular customers. Their father encouraged the children to be creative with their businesses to earn money for the school year, but they didn’t require much encouragement. “It was so fun,” Manzke said. “I look back and laugh, because I was really kind of insane.”
CreditPaola & Murray for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.
By the time Manzke was in high school, she’d turned her attention to a book of Filipino desserts and sweets — a thin pamphlet, less than 50 pages long, that she found in the kitchen. It didn’t look like much, but in it, she found a recipe for the golden-colored date-and-walnut bars known in the Philippines as food for the gods. The sweet is especially popular around Christmas, when it’s sold in individually wrapped squares, like tiny fruitcakes. All December, at home in Manila, Manzke made batches of the bars after school, then woke up at 4 a.m. to pack them in the cute boxes she built out of pieces of corrugated cardboard, glue and dark green paint.
Some batches were oilier than others. Some batches softer. Manzke liked the bars especially tender and chewy, packed with fruit and nuts. And as she refined the technique, based on the basic recipe in the pamphlet, more and more orders came in from her friends, and her friends’ parents, and her parents’ friends. She baked every day to keep up. “It was a lot of trial and error,” said Manzke, who noticed that creaming the butter too much, or using a light hand with the dates, would push the bars toward a more caky texture. Like any pastry chef in the making, she was now in a sweet, ongoing competition with herself, comparing each batch with the previous ones, and slowly moving toward an ideal.
Manzke went on to culinary school, then moved to Los Angeles to work in restaurant kitchens. She sells her perfected date-and-walnut bars at République, the Los Angeles restaurant and bakery she runs with her husband, Walter, where the pastry case is packed each morning with strawberry-pistachio tarts, banana-Nutella crostatas and big chocolate-chip cookies. If you can’t get there, you can make them at home: Cut the dates nice and big. Keep an eye on the butter and sugar, so the mixture doesn’t get overly pale and airy. And don’t skimp on the fruit and nuts. If you follow Manzke’s simple techniques, you’ll get the chewiness that makes the bars so special on your very first try.
Recipe: Date-and-walnut bars