You are cordially invited to buy the summer issue of Platteland. Within Platteland’s pages full of inspiration and small town charm, you will find my article about homemade fruit beers and cordials.

It was quite a challenging article in the sense that I had to do a lot of research and experimentation. All of which lead to a lot of strange bubbling and frothing containers that were littering the whole house. From pantry to bedroom, something was always brewing.  I had some extraordinary fails, with bottles exploding and illegal amounts of alcohol brewing but in the end, I think my final recipes are good. They are refreshing and thirst quenching without the ‘grill’ factor of opening an opaque re-used 2L Coke bottle, not knowing whether it is drinkable or more likely to kill you.

Have a look for yourselves and let me know! 

Since moving to the farm, I’ve started a cake policy. Everyone that lives here gets a personalized cake for his/her birthday. Growing up, I was lucky enough to receive my yearly birthday cake. While most of the cakes had less icing and more cake than I would have wanted at the time, my mom or ouma would always bake my cake and make me feel special.

The only cake that missed the mark was a fancy ice cream cake my mom made for my 11th birthday.  At the time ice cream cake was all the rage. She went to a lot of trouble to make the ice cream and mould it with shards of chocolate. Unfortunately, at the tender age of 11, I could care less about her efforts; I wanted cake, not frozen silliness.

Years later my then snobbishness comes back to haunt me with every failed attempt at a personalized birthday cake.

I try my best to give each person the type of cake he/she wants but I’m still struggling with baking at altitude. Some recipe’s work and others don’t. Some people get perfect birthday cakes while an unfortunate few have had to deal with lopsided, cracked cakes.

When things do go bad, I try to hide my mishaps with icing. One of these less than lovely looking cakes, plastered with extra icing, ended up with Nikkie. Nikkie loves cake but hates icing. He graciously accepted my birthday cake offering but kindly requested that I cool it with the icing on future cakes.

Karma is not a bitch, it’s a cake.

Natalia, Emma and I recently baked a Hello Kitty cake for one of the girls on the farm. The cake itself consisted of two rectangular vanilla sponges sandwiched together with strawberry jam (like a Victoria Sponge) and iced with buttercream icing. While the baking and icing took us the best part of 8 hours, the cake was inhaled by the kids in less than 20 minutes. As it should be.

A bit of a love letter to Sam
_______________________

I knew Sam long before I met her. My mom would keep me updated on the travels of this wonderful and exotic South African woman, criss-crossing the world with her husband. She would talk about a recent email, sent from Istanbul or the Caribbean or maybe some small island in the Mediterranean. I never read any of the emails, I could never tell you what my mom and Sam kept writing to each other about but at the time I imagined that Sam was like a culinary detective… Experiencing wonderful foreign foods and reporting back, sharing her new found secrets with my mom.

Somewhere toward the end of my teens, my mom announced that Sam was in town and that the three of us will be doing lunch. I really don’t remember much about that lunch, but I do remember feeling a bit like a vanilla wafer – flavourless, dry and boring - seated between these two formidable women talking about places and things I couldn’t begin to grasp. Sam politely asked me what I want to ‘do’ in life. I think I mumbled something about cooking or designing – in reality I wasn’t thinking about career choices, I was thinking how much brighter and full of handsome men my future would be if I had a tan like hers.

The lunch and many years passed until we met again at a Secret Dinner I cooked. The dinner was all about generous plates of food, people helping themselves and sharing. After dinner, Sam tried to compliment me on the food but ended up mothering me. I was to upset about a few leftovers to listen to any sweet talk. I was in tears and Sam hugged me tight and told me ‘but darling, everyone had thirds…’.

I could never fully explain how Sam and I became so close. We were and still are in such different places in our lives. Our friendship is based on the ups, the downs, the triumphs (however few and far between they might feel) and a shared love of kitsch.

I never got the fantastic tan, but since that fateful lunch, I’ve tried to educate myself about food, flavours and places. While my skin will always remain vanilla wafer, my soul is delicious, decadent dark chocolate with extra cream. Thank you Sam.
_____________________


Sam shares her passion for food, along with the ups, downs and triumphs of life in her monthly column for TASTE magazine. Read all about Sibastiaan’s first birthday, the celebration and of course the cakes in the latest issue!

One of the cakes, a Funfetti cake, is all over the internet. I never baked it before, but decided that the bright, kitsch sprinkles baked into a cake is the ultimate culmination of both Sam and my love for kitsch and nostalgia.  The recipe I used comes from www.bakedbree.com but I changed a few methods and ingredients. See below for my version of a funfetti cake.

Funfetti Cake – Makes 2 x 20cm round cakes

INGREDIENTS

2 ¼ cups cake flour

1 Tablespoon baking powder ( 1 teaspoon if, like me, you live in the mountains high above sea level)

1 ¼ cups buttermilk

4 egg whites

1 ½ cups white sugar

2 teaspoons rosewater  OR ½ teaspoon good quality rose essence

115g salted butter, room temperature

¾ cup rainbow sprinkles

METHOD

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Prepare two 20cm cake pans with butter, flour and wax paper.

Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl until combined and butter is light in colour. Add the rose flavour.

Sift the flour and baking powder together in a separate bowl.

Whisk the buttermilk and egg whites together in another separate bowl.

Gradually incorporate both the flour mixture and egg mixture into the butter/sugar mixture until combined.

Add the sprinkles to the cake batter and fold in until combined, making sure not to break the sprinkles.

Pour batter into prepared cake tins, ensuring equal amounts in each pan.

Bake in preheated oven for 30-35 minutes.

Once cakes are baked through, ALWAYS check the centre with a skewer, remove from the oven and allow to cool.

To decorate – ice the cake with a basic buttercream icing flecked with sprinkles.

In time I will write a whole essay about how much I love this kid and his parents, but for the moment I can only say that they deserve every moment of happiness. They fought for a family for six years and finally the family is complete with baby Sebastiaan. I was lucky enough to bake all the cakes for his first birthday celebration and what a celebration it was! Not just a birthday, but a shedding of past sadness and  a  massive embrace of the wonderful future with the most charming boy in the world.

Beetroot Pickle

12 medium sized, raw beetroots *
Cold water
700ml white wine vinegar
700ml reserved beetroot cooking liquid
3 tablespoons mustard seeds
2 tablespoons fennel seeds
½ teaspoon salt
650g white sugar
2 onions - sliced into 1cm thick rings

Place beets in a deep pot and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil and cook until the beets are just soft - do not overcook! Remove from the cooking liquid, retaining 700ml of the cooking liquid. Allow beetroots to cool completely before removing the tops and tails and gently pushing off the skins with your hands. Cut the beets into 1cm thick slices and set aside.
For the pickle, place the vinegar, reserved cooking liquid, sugar and salt into a pot and cook until the sugar has dissolved. Stir every so often to avoid the sugar from burning. 
Once the sugar has dissolved add 1 tablespoon mustard seeds and a pinch of the fennel seeds into the liquid and allow to steep.
To bottle, divide the mustard and fennel seeds between two big, sterilized jars. Stack the beetroot and onion disks in alternating layers until each bottle is full. Make sure to pack the vegetables tightly! Fill the bottles with the warm pickle juice, seal with caps and allow to cool.
Once cooled, keep in fridge for at least a week before using. Keeps well for 6 months.


* I used stripy beetroots because that’s what is growing in my garden… use whatever beets you can find!

I love popcorn. A seemingly childish snack, popcorn can be elivated by adding a few select spices. By melting a cup of sugar and pouring the resulting caramel over popped popcorn, you are sure to win over many a heart.

It’s interesting how challenging it is to keep on cooking new, good looking and tasting food here. I don’t have access to the wonderful little greens and exotics fruits available almost anywhere in South Africa. Here it’s dicey to buy Ice Berg lettuce and get it home without serious wilt setting in. 

While it might sound a bit depressing, the situation has forced me to dig deep and become seriously creative. Especially with salads. Without the punnets of wild rocket and sprinklings of red onion sprouts, farm salads don’t stands a chance against a sophisticated Cape Town Salad…
But just as salad sadness wants to set in I realize that my once feather light and tastefully acerbic salads have transformed into robust salads, packed full of flavour, colour and knobbly vegetables. 
And I don’t think it’s a bad thing. 
Change is good and salads are even better so here is my go-to-fast-farm salad. Dress it up with an Asian dressing or keep it simple with good balsamic, olive oil and lemon zest.



INGREDIENTS

2 medium sized carrots - washed and peeled
½ baby red cabbage
¼ large cucumber
1 clove of garlic - mashed into a paste
1 small handful of coriander
Maldon salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
Zest of one lemon
Juice of ½ a lemon
Best quality Balsamic vinegar
Best Quality Olive Oil

METHOD
First prep and mix the vegetables in a large bowl. Grate the carrot on a large holed grater and finely slice the cabbage. For the cucumber, use a vegetable peeler and peel ribbons of cucumber, not much longer than 10 cm, otherwise the ribbons become unwieldy. Toss the vegetables in the mixing bowl and add the mashed garlic and coriander, roughly torn. 
Season with salt and pepper and add the lemon zest. Toss once again and dress with the lemon juice, a splash of Balsamic and a good drizzle of olive oil. Toss once again and serve.

Serves 4 as a side salad

One of my all time favourite jobs has been the New Media Publishing Content Conference. It happened earlier this year and I was asked, alongside Hannerie Visser, to decorate the dining area (The Homecoming Centre) and provide the food. We created a nostalgic feeling with lace tablecloths, jars of sweets and a few traditional South African dishes. The hard work paid off as everyone loved the food and atmosphere. The whole project reminded me that South Africa has a wealth of different traditions and cultures which will hopefully keep on inspiring us as well as other for many years to come.

One thing about this desert is that meringues and macaroons just work...

My mom used to bake these cookies. In my opinion, the best chocolate chip cookies ever. Recipe below!