The traditional Filipina recipes created in Tita Rosie’s Kitchen sound mouth watering. Lila’s recipes sound delicious, comforting, but interesting enough that most readers have probably never had some of the combinations of flavors before. Manansala’s food descriptions are a highlight of this book.

I wasn’t sure where to buy banana leaves or duck eggs in my area, though, so stuck with a tried and true baking recipe. The bibingka mentioned in the title is baked rice cake from the Philipines that is cooked in banana leaves and often topped with cheese and duck egg, which sounds delicious. The backmatter contains quite a few recipes, although I opted to adapt the Salabat Snickerdoodle Squares using my go to snickerdoodle bar recipe with some ginger adjustments. This was a cozy food mystery that left me hungry to try all the Filipina recipes in the back of the book. But family is family, and Lila has to put aside her feelings about her wayward cousin to prove his innocence and find the real killer. Ronnie is immediately a suspect, and on top of that his mother starts receiving mysterious blackmail letters alluding to dark secrets in his past. When one of his investors dies of a poisoning at the winery, all of Lila’s doubts about Ronnie are proven correct.

Knowing Ronnie, he’s up to no good, just like he always was in high school. When her long lost cousin Ronnie moves back to Shady Palms after disappearing over ten years ago and buys a local winery, Lila is skeptical. Lila’s new coffee shop/bakery/plant shop, Brew-ha Café, is looking to make money it’s first year in business, and her relationship with dentist Jae Park is looking promising. In the third installment of Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series, it’s Christmastime in Shady Palms.

Blackmail and bibingka