Bake Happy
By Gail Bussi
(Struik Lifestyle) 2014
This is a hardback that will make many friends, particularly among those who find hi-tech, trendy cookbooks packed with glossy images of professional fare too daunting to contemplate. It’s a well-proportioned hardback, with a collection of treasured recipes – enhanced by memories of baking them with her mother or friends – that is quaintly appealing. Bussi’s whimsical line drawings and the odd winsome quote add an old-fashioned air to a very practical compilation of sweet and savoury bakes.
Bussi, who lives in Pretoria, is a natural cook who started young and has never ceased to collect recipes, develop and improve them until she is satisfied with her renderings of baked bliss. Along with catering professionally and baking for home industries, she is a freelance artist and journalist.
Her chapters don’t follow predictable categories, but are rather based on happy memories, shared occasions and celebrations of the heart.
She starts with her chocolate-orange cake baked for Terry, follows with aunt Eileen’s vintage chocolate cake and presents an English classic that should be revived: Devonshire cream cake. Other treats in this section include a Sunday night cake with butterscotch sauce that doubles as a pud, and devil’s food cake with white mountain icing.
Many of the recipes are inspired by those in an old handwritten ring-binder given to Bussi by her mother when she was in her early twenties. A well-preserved snapshot of her grandmother, great-aunt and great-grandmother, taken in Queenstown in 1932, adds veracity to British classics like Rosie’s scones, Chelsea bun scone and shortbread. A few were gleaned from Afrikaners (buttermilk custard pie) and her Hungarian apricot tart was baked by her German neighbour, Aunty Hoberg. Tradition is further upheld with venerable puds – creamy rice, chocolate fudge and lemon delicious.
Quick savoury breads – best eaten on the day they are baked – are among Bussi’s favourite: she presents us with a herb, cheese and wine loaf, followed by sausage, apple and sage rolls, cheese straws and heavenly bread puffs.
Celebrations are savoured with cheesecake, St Nicholas cake and mincemeat cake with brandy butter icing, Irish chocolate Guiness cake and caramel almond bars, specifically for picnics.
There’s plenty more – muffins and pizza, Sicilian cassata, Swedish holiday biscuits and decadent Hello Dollys from America. As an antidote to July temperatures at the Cape, Bussi’s version of Smiddy loaf sounds ideal: this recipe was found in an old Scottish book in the Teapot Trail series, and is named for a Highland tearoom in Laide, called Old Smiddy.
In these times of stretched budgets, Bussi’s recipes are notable for affordability – a pleasing contrast to contemporary extravagance trending now.
It’s not recommended reading for those on diet, but think of the following: “It’s actually difficult,” Bussi maintains, “to be angry or stressed when one is quietly pottering in the kitchen, rolling out dough or whipping sugar and butter… one is left feeling a lot calmer and more serene.”
Weekend Argus