We have this tradition at the office. You need to bring food on your birthday. It's an unwriten rule, a golden one if you will. And you earn heaven's ire if you don't -- LOL!

Well, since I was on vacation last Sunday and Monday, I brought ref cake today. My wife made it last night. Temptingly delicious! I couldn't taste it though. It had milk and a lot of cream in it. It's basically your own blend of fruit salad alternately laid in between thin layers of graham crackers. The final dollop of fruit salad is then topped with grated cheese, cherries, peach halves and a thin layer of alsa gulaman to hold the top together. It is then placed in the ref overnight, hence the name ref cake. People at the office call it crema de fruta, which is actually the commercial incarnation. Goldilocks sells a popular version of it. They replace the graham crackers with softer sponge cake or taisan, obviously to please aesthetic purists of the cake-frenzied masses. They actually sell like hotcakes (excuse the deliberate contradiction of the pun).

Anyway, the guys from my department were all praises for my wife's ref cake-cum-crema de fruta :-))