This month of May, our food blog, Certified Foodies, is celebrating its SECOND anniversary. And we can’t be more excited about the future. 🙂

Back in 2010, after months of conceptualizing on how we can make our food blog unique, we threw in the towel and decided that our passion and love for food will get our message across – that food should be enjoyed and shouldn’t just be for nourishment.

The past two years have been CRAZY… in a VERY good way. Here are some of our achievements so far:

• We were voted #1 in the Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs for 2011.
• Voted #10 amongst all the international food blogs competing for FriendsEAT’s Best Food Blogger in 2011.
• Our food blog was a finalist in the Philippine Blog Awards 2011 for Food and Beverage category (National level).
• We are now contributors for Breakfast Magazine, which was launched in February.

We are so thankful for all the blessings and recognition we’ve received through this food blog. Who would’ve thought that the food (mis)adventures of 2 siblings would take us this far? 😀

Thank you to all our fellow foodies and friends who have visited, left a comment or even lurked on our food blog to look at our food photos and articles. It means so much to us that you all find the time to drop by here, “like” our posts on Facebook or tweet with us. 🙂

 

 

New Design

Because of everything that has happened in the past 2 years, we believe this blog deserved a major makeover. After almost 2 years of slow loading time and unorganized, less personalized theme…

…this food blog is now sporting a brand spanking new theme, designed to our own personal tastes.

The theme was mainly designed by me (Mhel), but all the design elements and additional contents were from a collaboration of both  our ideas (me and Ken). We wanted a less cluttered look, almost minimalistic design, to bring more focus on the photos.

Now, the blog loads much faster after we moved to a new server. Even with the slideshow above and gallery below, feedback has been positive about our blog’s loading time (If you have violent reactions to this, let us know at the comments section!).

Since we believe our food photography skills have improved a lot over the past few months ;), we want this food blog to be more food porn friendly. 😉

The food porn gallery at the footer is clickable! 🙂

See the Chef’s Corner at the footer? That’ll be a place where Ken will be sharing his own recipes or anything related to his culinary journey. 🙂

If you check the navigation menu on top, some pages are not yet accessible. We’re still completing those pages, but the important thing is, the actual new theme of the blog is already working smoothly.

 

 

A New Year

We believe we’ve said this like a million times already, but we want this food blog to not just be about food product or restaurant reviews or features. We want to share more recipes from here on out, AND we’ll talk more about topics that we know a lot of you foodies can relate to or might be interested to know more about.

Our nanay will also be a part of our food blog. Yes, our dear fellow foodies, blogger na rin ang nanay namin! She even asked us to create a special section for her (she wants to call it “Virgie’s blog” LOL). 😀 Since we oh-so love her cooking, she’ll be sharing more recipes here from now on (we’re alloting a budget for her to do this 😉 ).

We can’t wait to share her kare-kare recipe. No restaurant has beaten the flavors of her version of this Filipino favorite. So, stay tuned! 🙂

 

 

The Burp Society

We also plan to launch The Burp Society this year. It’s still in the planning stages since we want to keep this foodie group as open to everyone as possible. What will happen with TBS is we’ll set a place, date and time for the foodie meetup, and anyone who’d like to join in can come. It’s like Meetup. 🙂

If you’d like to join in on the first The Burp Society meetup, tell us so at the comments section. We’d love to get the ball rolling. 🙂 It’s all about foodies (not just food bloggers) coming together to discover the flavors the Philippines and the world has to offer. 😉

Oh, and it’s the first time we’re revealing the logo of The Burp Society. The cartoon guy is by JM, my dear friend Joy’s (of Notepad Corner) son. 🙂

 

 

GIVEAWAYS!

Of course, our anniversary celebration wouldn’t be complete without a giveaway. This time, we’re doing things differently. It’ll be a series of giveaways and you’ll have the option to join the ones you like. But, we bet you’d want to join all of them ’cause the prizes were handpicked from our favorites from the past year! 🙂

We’ll update this post with the links to the giveaways. We strongly suggest you keep glued here on Monday for the first giveaway.

We’re so excited about this! 🙂 If you want to partner with us on a future giveaway, feel free to contact us.

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What do you think of our new blog design? Do you have any suggestion, or maybe an issue with the blog? Sound off at the comments section! 🙂