"Must be because we also gained a lot of weight through the years!" laughs daughter Tina Torres-Santos, the sixth of Belen"s eight children. The name of this popular dining place in Pasig hardly needs explaining. "We submitted several other names for it," shares Tina, "but none of them passed, so we settled for Mom & Tina"s."

Just like the ladies in the logo, the enterprise that started out as a hobby has, indeed, grown from the neighborhood bazaar that Belen used to hold every Christmas in front of their old Greenhills residence in the early 1970s. There, she and Tina would sell home-baked cookies (at roughly P2 a piece!) and her signature handmade Early American-style Christmas décor, quilts, pillows, plates and other knick knacks. "We did not sleep when December came!" Tina recalls. At a time when home baking was not even heard of, eager customers trooped to the Torres home for the delicious, freshly made chocolate cookies, spritz butter cookies, mamon tostado, mango squares, cashew squares, food for the gods, butter cakes, banana cakes and chocolate cakes.

"Take a look at our logo!" exclaims Belen Torres, pioneering proprietor of Mom & Tina"s Bakery Café. "The two ladies there used to be slim but now they"re fat!" she quips. Tina takes care of the baking side of the business. "I always liked watching mom bake.

Every afternoon, she"d make breads, pies and pastries, and our neighbors and cousins would be there for merienda, too! We would bake everyday!" Even as a grade school student at Maryknoll College, Tina was holding cooking and baking demonstrations; and, while studying Hotel and Restaurant Management at the University of the Philippines, she was selling her baked goodies. "I love experimenting. We had a lot of magazines and cook books in the old house and I would play around with the recipes."

When Belen moved house to Green Meadows Subdivision, Tina soon followed and turned the place into a compound. "I had more space, so I hired a panadero and expanded the laundry area into a kitchen. The guy only knew how to bake bread, so I taught him how to make our cakes and desserts, and started selling them from home." She describes Mom & Tina"s menu as American-style food that her mother used to serve at home. "What we eat at home, you find here. I just standardized the recipes and present the food in individual portions."