A little South African sweetness…
A couple of weeks back I got asked to cater for the South African Manila based community Christmas party … with me being South African, how could I say no?
As I was writing their menu, I started getting excited about cooking South African desserts again, as the last time I did this was as a young kid sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table helping her bake.
As I scratched around for recipes in my food stained recipe book that I have had since I started cooking ( it’s hardly legible anymore so I think digitalising it needs to happen soon), I found my grandmother’s recipes which brought me back about 28 years to her kitchen table with me helping her braid the koeksisters, teaching me all her little cooking secrets.
One of the desserts I made was Koeksister (pronounced Cook sister), a South African classic that gets served at every cake shop up and down the country. It’s braided dough that is deep fried and then immediately dropped into cold syrup.
This recipe is all in cups and teaspoons (shows you how old it is)
Recipe
Syrup
1 kg Sugar
1.5 cups of water
2 cinnamon sticks
3 cloves
1 whole lemon Zested
Dough
5 cups Cake Flour
1 tsp Salt
4tsp Baking powder
8 tbls Butter (roughly 130g)
2 Eggs
1 cup water
Method
Before making the dough, you need to get the syrup going, mix all the ingredients together and bring to a boil. Turn off and cool it down completely in the fridge.
Sift your cake flour, salt and baking powder together in a bowl. Sifting helps to remove impurities in the flour but more importantly aerates the flour to make the koeksisters just that little lighter.
Add the softened butter to the dry ingredients and work in till it looks like breadcrumbs, add the water slowly and mix for about 10-15 min till it forms a ball and is silky smooth.
Place it in a bowl and leave to rest for about an hour or so. What this does is help to relax the glutens in the flour. It won’t double in size because there is no yeast.
After about an hour, roll the pastry out to about 1/8 inch thick and cut the dough into rectangles (mine was the thickness of the ruler and 3 inches long)
Starting from just below the top, cut the dough into three even strips and start braiding or plaiting them. My grandmother always told me to try and get the outside legs into the centre and then just carry on doing that until you get to the end. Surprisingly, this came naturally to me after not doing it for about 12 years
Now deep fry those bad boys in oil at 180deg C. Now is a good time to get your syrup out the freezer and place it on ice. It is crucial that your syrup is ice cold when the hot koeksisters go into it.That will help it soak up loads of that cinnamon and lemon syrup.
Leave them in there for about 10 mins or so, take them out and put them on a rack to drip off all the excess syrup.
You can then pop them in the fridge or even freeze them…
