by Cecilia Ortiz Luna
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, when millions of people were either glued to their TVs watching Tiger King, or engaging in cage matches over toilet paper, Sanna Velasco had the most beautiful problem. Her blog, Woman Scribbles, had been experiencing a deluge of massive traffic from everywhere in the world.
The reason: her blog was about baking. Specifically, baking bread.
“It seemed the world resorted to one activity: baking bread,” Sanna recalls. “Traffic was through the roof. I barely had to promote anything, but people kept coming to the site.”
It may have been a hellish virus that drove people to her site, but it seemed it was the blog’s heavenly match of conversational writing and professional grade photographs that made them stay. By then, Sanna had been blogging for eight years, and taking pictures of her baked creations for the last six.
The expertise and sophistication honed during those periods were in full display by the time the pandemic bread-baking frenzy drove the multitudes to Woman Scribbles. The staging of the bread products are Martha Stewart-worthy, the heat of their oven-freshness seeming to leap off the screen. Armed with her Olympus camera and what little light was streaming through the basement window of her Winnipeg home, Sanna mastered the art of photographing her subjects.
And what photogenic subjects! Her braided loaves look intricately woven, their surfaces glistening with buttery flakiness. Her cinnamon rolls, slathered with cream cheese, seduce the reader with their promise of gooey goodness. And ube, a recurring element in a lot of her concoctions, bursts forth in bombastic purple.
Woman Scribble’s aesthetic, as befits a baking blog, has a sweetness to it. Its color scheme uses pastel palettes; its navigation icons use whimsical images. The recipes are laid out in grey scale, eye-friendly fonts set against large white spaces. The baking instructions themselves are plainspoken and easy to follow, making the process of baking seem effortless.
Sanna has featured hundreds of breads in her blog, and has also ventured into non-bread creations like panna cotta and overnight oats. When asked about recipes that she finds challenging, she gives an impish smile and says, “I haven’t mastered doing kakanin.” She does, however, have a killer recipe for pandesal, the queen of Filipino breads.
What makes Sanna’s blog particularly inviting and accessible to readers is that she starts every post with lovely little stories; childhood memories that a particular bread evoked in her; the serendipitous event that led her discovering that bread; or just the simple joy of seeing the result of an untried recipe. She sounds like a doting ate, inviting you oven side to watch the alchemy of creating something phenomenal from what used to be just flour, eggs and water.
Her skill in baking might not come as a surprise once you find out that Sanna was a trained chemist in the Philippines. From 2006, when she arrived in Canada with her father, until 2016, when she gave birth to second child, she worked as a lab technician.
However, what might be more surprising is that she didn’t even know how to bake when she started the blog. “Woman’s Scribbles was originally a lifestyle blog where I wrote about my thoughts and musings as a mom, a woman, ganun. I had a range of topics. I taught myself to bake and started documenting them in the blog. After some time, I noticed that the posts with baking recipes in them were getting more traction so I started to post more of it. Then I fell in love with food photography, so I started to really hone in on that. Once I niched down to baking I found it easier to focus and at the same time I enjoyed it.”
In July of 2022, Sanna’s family relocated to Calgary. The move proved to be a blessing. She loves Calgary’s modern vibe, its diversity, and the fact that in the city and its environs, there are a lot of places to go for this family with three young kids. Their new house also sparks joy in her because of an important feature: “It has lots of natural light, perfect for my food photography.”
For the readers of Salingpusa Magazine, we will see more of Sanna as she will be our resident food columnist (hurray!).
