Shop Halo Halo: Filipino desserts and house-made ube

At 50th and Woodstock, across from the library, two Filipina-owned businesses used to share a single space, one selling plants and one selling pastry. The pastry half was Shop Halo Halo, a dessert stop where Geleen Abenoja's ube is worth planning a day around. Halo-halo means "mix-mix," and that's the idea behind the menu, different sweets that go together. Abenoja is a first-generation Filipina-American who grew the bakery from pop-ups into a shop inside Botanical Bakeshop on SE Woodstock, which it shared with Daphne's Botanicals, and that's the location most people in Portland remember.

The Woodstock shop is permanently closed. While the next kitchen gets built, Shop Halo Halo has been popping up at Union Way PDX, an indoor strip of small shops and boutiques across from Powell's City of Books, and during the soft opening it's been open Thursday through Sunday with a small case. Check the account the shop actually updates before you head over, since a small dessert shop moves around a lot more than a big bread bakery does.

The ube here is a deep, cooked purple. Halo-halo comes in gorgeous layers you can see from the top, with beans, jellies, fruit, leche flan, shaved ice and evaporated milk, and the house-made ube halaya goes into almost everything. It tends to change the mind of anyone who only knows ube from a jar.

What to order

Order the halo-halo when they're serving it, since it's the namesake. Eat your way down through the cup instead of hunting for one perfect bite, because the ice melts into the milk, the flan adds custard, and the fruit, jellies and ube change from one spoonful to the next. It's usually the reason people come, so a sold-out day is a real letdown.

The everyday case holds bibingka, cassava cake, ube cupcakes with a violet crumb, and lavender calamansi shortbread that smells like citrus and flowers, and those are the shop's own pastries. The house-made ube halaya, a purple yam jam cooked until it's dense and glossy, shows up as a filling again and again, and you should ask about it even if you're only buying cookies. Other treats rotate, like ube cheese pandesal, black sesame butter mochi, ube crinkle cookies and seasonal shortbreads, so see what's out and pick a few different things.

Before you go

Check the hours first. It's usually Thursday through Sunday, but that can change, and Abenoja has popped up, fundraised and moved as the business outgrew or left a space. If Union Way is the current spot, go there (it's downtown, across from Powell's, in a small indoor strip) and skip the trip to Woodstock, and if a new storefront has opened, go there instead. You won't find bread or croissants here, so if someone in your group wants naturally leavened bread, pick it up somewhere else and meet for dessert. Shop Halo Halo makes a sweet last stop on a walk, which also keeps the ube cupcakes from riding around under a warm miche.

The case is small, so it helps to be flexible. One week the thing to get might be the halo-halo and the next it might be the cassava cake, so ask what the bakers are proudest of that day and listen for something specific, like a flavor, a texture or a filling they cooked themselves. It's where you go for Filipino pastry from someone who cooks her own ube.

The essentials are on the Shop Halo Halo page.