Laravel blade page not processing tags

I have a site that I'm deep into developing. To keep the question simple, if I go into my welcome.blade.php (the standard Laravel welcome page), it is completely untouched. I go right under the Laravel 5 written there and type:

{!! "<b>Foo!</b>" !!}

When I refresh the page in the browser, it literally says "{!! "Foo!" !!}" and not just Foo!.

To troubleshoot, I created a new project and put the same exact code in my welcome.blade.php and it worked. So, what could be wrong with my site that I'm currently developing? Both are on Laravel 5.1.20.

via Chebli Mohamed