Seapoint Research Trip with Chocolate

Serendipity on a plate at My Sugar

There are two sorts of days when you write for a living. The ones where you sit at your computer all day, um, writing...  plus the ones where the entire day goes by at your computer not actually writing anything publishable, (make that three sorts), but sending out endless emails to people that you need information or images from with  frequent lapses onto Facebook just to distract you from the fact that not a single word has been written, apart from all those email words which don’t count towards your word count.

And then there are, very occasionally, days like today. Golden days. Days that start out with one plan and end up serendipitously turning into something else. Today we had a client meeting in town at 10, which I planned on following up with a quick drive around Seapoint in Cape Town, to research background for an article that has a looming deadline. So I dressed for a casual meeting,one step up from my work at home winter uniform of jeans and fleece jacket, and headed out with my husband (we work as a team for our web clients) into a sunny but very windy winter day driving along the N7 to town, long views of Table Mountain all the way.

Then just as we hit the N1 he gets a call to cancel the meeting, one partner called away the other one keeping the business going single handed, can we postpone?

So suddenly the whole morning lies ahead of us and all of Seapoint to research. Our first port of call is a little cafe called My Sugar that opened recently and that I will review for another article later on. I’d originally planned on just a quick look in today, but now with no meeting and Patrick desperate for coffee, we grab a table and I settle in to tasting... chocolates. Yes my best... and if ten o’clock in the morning ought to be too early who cares, chocolate is always chocolate and this is the real deal. I’m not going to review it here yet because I need to save the drum rolls for my print article, but suffice to say that if you love good chocolate and good coffee, you have to go there and taste for yourself.

Two perfect chocolates on a plate at My Sugar

Back to the car and ready to go exploring we find ourselves in the road a friend now lives in. On the off-chance we phone to see if she’s around, to find her kicking her heels at home between the arrival of various electricians and window fitters, with plenty of time to chat. A cup of tea and catch up are followed by a personalized guided tour of the back streets of Seapoint, gathering way more detail and local gossip than will ever fit into my article but so much more interesting with a life-long local to show you around than to go researching on your own.

We headed up to the heights of Fresnaye where huge houses are worth multiple millions (R60 million for some), and where stunning views out over the ocean or up behind at the mountain are enjoyed by security watchmen and builders, while absent foreign owners are off enjoying somewhere else’s sunshine. Then we descended to lower levels where the air is less rarefied and more suitable for mere mortals to breathe, muddled along Main Road, pottered along the promenade and went to gaze at the lone swimmer doing lengths in the Pavilion swimming pool, where the temperature was advertised at 13C today, one degree warmer than the ocean. Everyone I'd previously spoken to about Seapoint had told me that it’s got the best weather and is much less windy than the City Bowl. Well today was the day that proved the exception to the rule. The wind was blowing in earnest, palm trees having a bad hair day, but the sun was shining and those veteran die-hard swimmers aren’t deterred by such considerations as comfort.

Seapoint Pavilion - salt water pools with the ocean behind

By then after so much leisurely and pleasurable dawdling, school pick up time was nagging at our thoughts. Far from our West Coast stomping grounds with dog food to buy, petrol to put in and three kids to collect, we relinquished the urban vibe, calculated that our whole farm with four houses on it would probably not even buy us a two bedroom flat here and pointed the car to Melkbos.

And as this was a day of being a food writer and food trucks are one of the current Cape Town food happenings not to be ignored, we patronised our I love Melkies food truck for the first time for a late lunch (I was slightly jittery on caffeine and chocolate by this time) and had a very enjoyable toasted bagel with scrambled egg and red onion for me and a real proper hot dog for him with red onion, gherkins and sweet chilli sauce. Definitely a good street food experience to be repeated.

I Love Melkies food truck in Melkbosstrand

Now I’ve got enough notes to write my Seapoint article, an almost written review and a whole blog post out of my day, I feel energised and well fed both physically and mentally, and it was great having my husband along for the adventure too, all thanks to the postponed client meeting. Here's to many more research trips with him along as driver and co-ordinator!

Guilt-Free Chocolate Discovery

Edited to add: Before you get as excited as I was about this new chocolate there has since grown up a storm of controversy around it. Its labelling is misleading at best - there is sugar in this bar, it just comes from honey according to the makers, but it isn't going to be any good for diabetics or paleo people. They do a diabetic bar apparently, but check it all out  before you buy and don't go by the over optimistic labels shown below! Shame as it's very tasty! Here's the manufacturer's statement.

Oh my word! I have just discovered the chocoholic’s dream fix – a bar of dark chocolate that is sugar-free, fat-free and perfect for sharing with banting friends (or is the sharing aspect a down-side? Will have to think about that).

Basically this bar is all chocolate, no weird ingredients, and it is smooth and dark, just how I like my chocolate. Only problem is it disappears too quickly – the bars look nice and big, but they are thin, so the temptation is to keep snapping off a bit more and a bit more till it’s all gone. But then that happens with any good chocolate in this house.

The story that I was told at Nature’s Deli, where we happened upon this bar the other day, is that the Swiss technology division who produce the couverture have developed a new natural way of taking the bitterness from the cocoa beans, a bit like decaffeinating coffee, but without using any chemicals. So all you get in the bar is 70% organic cocoa and 30% organic cocoa butter. Then it’s tempered six times instead of just once or twice, to get silky smooth chocolate that melts in the mouth.

If I have any criticism it’s that the packaging could do with a little more work to make it user-friendly. Because the bar is thin it has a cardboard backing and the foil inside is glued to the card, which made it hard to re-wrap neatly. Not something that’s going to put me off buying it though!

The Le Chocolatier factory is in Paarl and their retail shop is in Stellenbosch. You can also buy online or at a few health shops around Cape Town. Oh, and it only costs a few rand more than my other favourite (but mass-produced with no pretensions to organic status) chocolate bar, so it's good value for that amount of foodie halo polishing credentials.

Now I’ve gone and finished the bar, all in the name of research while I was writing this, so I definitely need more, sooner rather than later.


Disclosure: I wasn't asked to review this product and my sister-in-law bought it for me to try, thanks SIL!

Easter, Simnel Cake and Stuff

A rather rustic Simnel cake

Easter is all but a distant memory already, the only witnesses to it actually having happened are the three baskets still overflowing with chocolate eggs in the larder, which have to be shifted off my box of flour and dry ingredients every time I bake. Oh and the Easter trees still dangling decorated blown eggs, even though I told the kids that we’d take them down again the weekend after Easter.

April has gone by in flurry of life happening too fast. First George had biliary fever, (not unusual for young dogs living on a farm here where ticks are an inescapable part of life, but it can be fatal if you don’t treat it) which luckily we caught early enough for one visit to the vet to cure quickly. Then that was put out of our minds by Middle Daughter getting sick, and staying slightly sick with a low grade fever for over a week. The first visit to our GP/homeopath revealed nothing more than a sore throat, even with blood tests, the second visit with X ray and more blood tests had us despatched post haste to a specialist physician in the hospital. He dictated an overnight stay, as she had an atypical pneumonia, sneakily lurking at the top of one lung where it’s hard to hear.

Never having been in hospital with any of my children (since Middle Daughter’s fall from a kitchen counter as a 6 week baby, don’t ask! – even more scary than this occasion) it was both an experience I never want to repeat and one that we both found an interesting learning experience. She was feeling tired but not all that sick and was completely stalwart about the horrors of having an IV drip put in, not once but three times, when they couldn’t find a vein that would do; this after undergoing the earlier blood tests, where it took them four goes to get a vein, and two lots of blood type thumb pricking, which seems to be just part of the admissions procedure. There was a whole lot of waiting around, very nice friendly nurses, who got us into a single room, so that I could stay with her, even though she is now old enough to be in the adult ward. Then there was the fun of ordering from the menu for the next day and pretending we were in a posh hotel (for the cost of an overnight stay it certainly felt like we should be!).

The lunch menu

Luckily our physician was very sympathetic and let us go home the next morning with a huge goodie bag of antibiotics, nebulising capsules and probiotics, and she got progressively better. After another week off school she had recovered enough to gather her Easter bounty of way too many eggs without staggering under the weight of them all! And now she just gets irritated when we check how she’s feeling, as she is completely better, back to school, riding again, as if nothing happened. Thank goodness!

About to set off on a farm-wide Easter egg hunt

We always have a Simnel cake at Easter, with its balls of marzipan enclosing a heap of speckled eggs. It’s a family tradition, one that my mother used to make, though now she says she hasn’t made one for years. My brother in Australia went all nostalgic when he saw my picture of it on Facebook and asked for the recipe, so I’m sharing it here and have promised to make it for him when we meet up in the UK in July at my Mum’s for a family reunion. I always use Delia Smith’s recipe from her Book of Cakes, but over the years I’ve found a couple of little tweaks make a difference, so here is her recipe with my adjustments.

Simnel Cake Recipe
Ingredients
175g/6oz butter
175g/6oz sugar
3 eggs beaten
500g/18oz mixed dried fruit/fruit cake mix
zest of 1 orange and 1 lemon
225g/8oz plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon mixed spice
3 tablespoons milk

Marzipan
350g/12oz ground almonds
350g/12oz icing sugar sifted
3 egg yolks
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon either brandy or sherry
1 tablespoon apricot jam
1 egg beaten for glaze

20cm/8inch cake tin lined and greased
Preheat oven to 150˚C 300˚F

First make the marzipan.
Combine the ground almonds and icing sugar in a bowl and mix well.
Beat the egg yolks with the lemon juice and brandy and mix the liquid into the dry ingredients.
Mix and stir and knead until it all comes together in a pliable ball.
You may need more lemon juice. Try not to overwork it with your hands as this can make the marzipan oily, especially on a hot day.
Divide the ball into three equal parts, wrap in clingfilm and keep cool until needed.

Now to the cake mixture.
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Beat in the eggs one at a time.
Fold in the dried fruit and orange and lemon zest.
Sift the flour with the mixed spice and the baking powder.
Fold the flour into the mixture, alternating with the milk. You may need another tablespoon of milk if the mixture is too stiff.
Spoon half the cake mixture into the lined cake tin and smooth it out so it is level.

Roll out one portion of the marzipan to fit the cake tin.
Lay it gently on top of the cake mixture.
Spoon on the other half of the mixture and level it out.
Bake in the centre of the oven for about 2 hours until the centre is firm and springy.
Cool on a wire rack

When the cake is cool, prepare the rest of the marzipan.
Roll one piece out to fit the top of the cake.
Divide the other piece into twelve and roll into small balls.
Brush the top of the cake with apricot jam.
Lay the circle of marzipan on top and press down gently.
Brush the top with beaten egg.
Make twelve small crosses (arranged like the hours around a clock face) with the point of a knife and fix the balls around the edge of the cake.
Brush them with beaten egg too.
Put the cake under a hot grill for just long enough to toast it to a golden colour, perhaps 5 minutes. Keep an eye on this as it is very easy to go dark tan rather than golden glow(see my picture!)
Cool and store in an airtight tin.

And just a few pictures of our early morning Easter egg hunt:

The final haul being audited and re-distributed where numbers aren't even.

Chocolate Makes the World Go Round

Organic cocoa beans at CocoaFair

Or if it doesn’t it certainly makes it a better place. Especially if it is artisan chocolate, made from ethically and organically grown beans. It was a Monday, the start of a short, one-week, pre-Easter school holiday and I decided that this was the perfect ‘take my girls to work with me’ opportunity. I was writing an article on artisan chocolate producers in the Western Cape, and CocoáFair invited me to come and look round. Usually all my kids see of my work is me sitting in front of the computer all day, so what better way to bring the world of writing to life than to see me gathering its raw material, in this case chocolate!

The first thing to greet us is a warm and velvety smell drifting alluringly up the steps to the doorway. It doesn’t take the glance through the glass walls to a tap splurging a stream of chocolate into a gleaming stainless steel machine to know we’re in the right place. CocoáFair is at the trendy Old Biscuit Mill in Cape Town’s Woodstock, where on Saturdays the Neighbourgoods Market is a bustle of flavour and hipness. On a Monday it is quieter, but there is still quite a vibe going on. The premises is under the old silo and the old grain chutes are incorporated into the decor.

We are whirled through the chocolate finishing room, through the chilly cooling room and to the start of the process, the inside room where the beans are first transformed into chocolate. Our guide is Marlon, who has been involved  in CocoáFair right from the start 4 years ago, acquiring that sixth sense needed to coax the cacao beans to perfection. We meet his babies and his mother-in-law, the shining specialist machines imported from Scotland that are one reason that there are so few artisan bean to bar producers. Besides the fact that the machinery is a huge investment in itself, the level of skill need to roast the beans to the exact point where they are warm and nutty without a shred of bitterness, isn’t something that can be acquired overnight. And that’s only the first stage of the highly skilled operation.

Marlon with his 'mother-in-law'

Marlon talks us through the process at a chocolate- fuelled pace and the kids and I learn all about the various processes. We crunch a roasted bean, see how the beans are separated out into nibs (the cocoa-loaded bit in the middle) and husks (which are then used by an ex-employee to make an exfoliating body-scrub, all part of their no-waste ethic). We taste the liquor (chocolate liquid and nothing to do with alcohol) mixed with cocoa butter and organic sugar in the process of being refined, which can take a couple of days, and promise faithfully not to drop anything into the mother-in-law, the imposing machine that refines the chocolate and which costs R35,000 just to open, drain and service once a year. It’s only ever used to produce dark chocolate and it’s a feat of mathematics to work out quantities when switching from 71% to 95% varieties.

A peek into the luscious swirl inside the machine

By the time we leave the inside room, with its chemical-free fly strips to catch any exotic bugs that might hatch out of the hessian sacks of beans (don’t worry any bugs and bacteria are naturally dealt with in the roasting process, without any need for contaminating chemicals), the chocolate has reached the stage of being big blocks ready to work with further. Big 1 kg slabs are sold on directly to hotels and restaurants and the rest is moulded into bars, Easter eggs and other delights. We meet Zuki, who has a delicate hand in making luscious chocolate truffles, and the four employees currently busy wrapping bars by hand. Part of the social enterprise aspect is creating jobs and training new employees gradually in the skills of chocolate. They start sweeping floors, move up to wrapping and then gradually become absorbed into the actual making.

Moulded Easter Eggs hand-painted by the CocoaFair team

Now we start to taste the finished chocolate. I hurry to taste, take notes and compare, but find that it all goes by in a flurry of Mmmmms. The 95% is incredibly smooth and not at all bitter, my girls both like the 71%, when they find most dark chocolates too strong. There’s also an 85%, a 65% and a sweet but still satisfyingly dark 56%. The percentage indicates the amount of cocoa solids and cocoa butter, the other part of the equation being pure organic sugar.

Then there are bars with added flavours, all of which have been carefully created to complement and not overwhelm the chocolate. The mint comes from Marlon’s garden to ensure it is organic, the bruised leaves then being infused in the chocolate for a clean and aromatic flavour. The chilli flavour was worked on for 3 weeks to get exactly 10s delay in the chilli glow coming through. There’s an espresso coffee, a hazelnut, a sea salt and some milk chocolates, the surprise hit being a subtle liquorice milk chocolate which is interestingly moreish. And the white chocolate has a warm creaminess that is more than just sugar, being made with a substantial amount of pure cocoa butter, no other vegetable fats, just milk and sugar added.

The staff are given a free rein on decorating the moulded chocolate Easter eggs and encouraged to experiment on developing new flavours of truffles and pralines. These are sold on the market stall and if they are a success become part of the range on offer.

Filling the chocolate moulds...chocolate on tap!

We receded out through the last room to the intense scent of orange and the sight of moulds being filled quickly and deftly with the molten magic. Then we were left with the hardest decision of the morning. Which of the bars we had tasted to buy for the rest of the family at home?

Thank you so much to Heinrich for inviting us, to Marlon for the fascinating tour and to the whole CocoáFair team for producing such delicious chocolate!

CocoáFair is at: The Old Biscuit Mill (under the silo), 373-375 Albert Road, Woodstock
Open: Mon-Fri 8-5pm  Sat 8-2pm
Tours: Saturday 10-2pm R50 pp and groups by appointment during the week
Tel: 021 447 7355