New York New Year

We are in New York City for a short city break, staying in an elegant brownstone apartment in Stuyvesant Heights in the uber-trendy suburb of Brooklyn. We return at the weekend to our tiny, humid, scruffy dot in the Caribbean to resume 'normal' life - although it has to be said that this (ie NYC) feels more normal and that (the island) always feels slightly surreal and unwordly, even when living there.

I'm sure like many others, we do not like to feel or be seen as tourists, but as 'temporary residents'. As we play out our small fantasy here, my winter 'Paperwhite' narcissus, acquired at the Union Square Farmer's Market, sit on the windowsill which I'm desperate to flower before we return to the Tropics. We're mastering the subway, eating at local restaurants and did a marathon shop at the new Whole Foods in Gowantus, Brooklyn to stock up for the week. We're loving it.

After another intensely physical year of mothering three growing boys, playing pioneer and co-running an artisanal bakery start-up, I'm happy to be having a rather cerebral time of it here and have basically spent the past 24 hours doing little more than reading the New York Times from cover to cover (even the sports section) and Christopher Hitchen's memoir 'Hitch 22' which I have enjoyed immensely.

My primary new years resolution, apart from all the obvious (gym, wine, ciggies, swearing) is to resume some form of intellectual or intelligent life - that of beyond the day-to-day survival struggle which takes up all our time and energy and renders us myopic with exhaustion by the end of the day. I hope to be able to do some more writing and build yet more frontiers, through both travel and dare I say it, compromises. Well that's the plan anyway.

After a great Christmas Season in our little bakery, we are visiting as many bakeries here in New York as possible, to both 'self assess' ourselves as well as be inspired. It's a new form of market research, which we are enjoying with great alacrity and sense of purpose!

Our Christmas at home was quiet, with a lot of snoozing in amongst the nerf guns and 'lunch' at 6pm, followed almost immediately by bed. It was essentially a 'holding pattern' day as we traveled north shortly afterwards - although we enjoyed our own Christmas tree a lot more than the one at Rockefeller Plaza, which was shared with about 10,000 other 'temporary residents!'

Two weeks before Christmas

My gingerbread garland which lasted about an hour  

The mince pie-o-meter in the bakery is starting to climb steeply. Not only do we now have a driver who has immediately become indispensable, but we also have Mary who just focuses on sandwiches and mince pies. We've come a long way from last year.

My new years resolution is definitely to seek help around my Martha Stewart Type A tendencies, which are border-line masochistic when trying to run a commercial bakery.

I really needed to make the Donna Hay Gingerbread Men garland for our bakery Christmas decorations. No Kmart tinsel for us, thank you. Ours is from Anthropologie, no less. I simply cannot help myself.

So I did make the garland - about 5 times in the end. The first lot I burnt. The second lot fell to bits in the humidity and looked like a gingerbread massacre. The third lot got bumped and replaced. Once, twice and then finally thrown in the bin. Sigh.

It has also been a sad week: I've been baking at home with South African radio on, listening to all the tributes for Mandela and the nation in mourning. One never cries for just one loss - sadness seems to well up and accumulate - and so there have also been tears for my own family losses too.

Tuesday 10 December

This has all been interspersed, of course, with being insanely busy along with moments of feeling quite unhinged. I threatened to give the children away on BVI Bring & Buy, less I harmed them, and I also felt like I'd taken up the Japanese sport of motor car drifting as I screamed backwards & forwards up and down slippery, wet island hills - the Simon & Garfunkel "Slow down, you're going to fast di-di-di-deeeeee" song playing on a loop in my noisy head.

So, we're looking forward to a quiet family Christmas and a few days R & R in New York. Tyler has not been off-island for 2.5 years and we all need some bright city lights and someone else doing the cooking.

But until then, it's heads down for mince pies.

Legacy

It is really chilly here today and a good day for Remembrance & Reflection as the rain pours down and we get ready to trim the Christmas tree.

It's been a sad week with the death of Nelson Mandela.  I've done a lot of crying over the past few days as I've read the outpouring of emotion on Facebook, TV news and newspaper articles from around the world and in South Africa.

It aches to be so far away from home.

As I drove the kids to school on Friday morning, we were talking about Madiba and what he meant to all of us. The children have of course a fairly sanitized view of the whole thing and parrot off  about their hero whilst not having any real sense of the deep horrors of apartheid and the civil war waged to end it.

Like my father who reluctantly spoke about the Second World War, our generation doesn't talk much about 'The Struggle': Of Soweto 1976 and seeing children of one's own age being gunned down in the streets or witnessing families being forcibly removed from their homes in District 6 to be dumped in the sandy wastelands of the Cape Flats.

It was hard to explain to the boys the ludicrous concept of a "banned person" or how the majority of people in South Africa had absolutely no rights whatsoever and where laws institutionalized injustice and oppression.

As we talked in the car, I realized I was speaking Martian to the kids. Nothing can quite explain the traumatic experience of Neil Agget's funeral or the hauntingly, beautiful singing accompanying United Womans Organization's rallies or the terrifying knocks on doors in the middle of the night. It was a fearful, bloody rollercoaster ride of a time. It was our late teens and twenties and we were in the middle of it, with Mandela at the forefront.

Many years later, just after I returned to South Africa after 10 years of living in London, I was privileged to attend the opening of the Robben Island Museum. During the guided tour around the island, we stopped off to have cocktail snacks at the Old Prison Commanders House, an attractive sprawling Victorian manor with fabulous views over Table Bay towards Cape Town and Table Mountain.

It forcibly hit me as I sat there that this was the view that Nelson Mandela and his fellow prisoners must have looked at everyday for all those long years, which coincided with my own carefree years growing up in Cape Town.

Mandela was incarcerated on Robben Island when I was 2 years old and released 28 years later, when I was already living in London. He and his fellow prisoners must have watched Cape Town grow from their island prison: the multiplying harbour, the growing smog, the mushrooming skyscrapers and looping Foreshore  flyovers. They must have seen Tableview sprawl and the apartheid madness of Atlantis all from that close distance.

How incredibly cruel that must have been: To see but be excluded from everyday, normal life: Your families. Your kids. Your aging parents. Your colleagues from work. Your friends. Your life.

It is so notable that whilst Mandela was a politician first and foremost, he spoke so profoundly and wisely about the importance of living: Of making the most of your life.  Of being the best one can be. Of never giving up.

I feel this legacy so keenly, sitting on my own island now: That life is important, that we need to have a legacy and that we have to make a difference.

Nkosi Sikele Nelson Mandela. Thank you for your life.

Girl Friday, not to be confused with Black Friday

Forgive me yet another crummy Blackberry photo, but I keep missing all these Cadbury Moments in the bakery- so no future websites and cookery books, if I do not put perfectionist tendencies aside.  I'm sure you get the gist, anyway. Lots of baking and pumpkin and pecan pies for Thanksgiving. 

Today is wonderfully wintery - cool, rainy, misty. A Stay-At-Home type of day to sort out the million and one things that need doing, but also to avoid the Black Friday mayham in town today - despite our almost complete lack of shops - as well as 3 cruise ships. This didn't stop me however from doing my first bit of random Christmas shopping and I also managed to over-indulge my stationary fetish. Which normal woman can resist a pretty box of 'merci beaucoup' Letterpress cards? Not this one. And of course they weren't on sale.

So I'm now happily ensconced indoors, sort of getting on with all my Girl Friday things, but not really. We are putting up our Christmas decorations in the bakery tomorrow, which need to be made today - so that's also on the To Do list. There's bakery ordering to be done, cheques to sort out, judo belts to be found, quotes to send out, accounts to update, Christmas cards to fiddle with, advent calendars to fill. An endless moosh of domestic, business, bureaucratic, bakery and family things that just pours in relentlessly.

So of course I thought I'd start with the blog, in no way a priority, but in the same happy basket as the Letterpress cards, which makes for quite a jolly morning really.

So there you go: I'm both grateful and thankful for random mornings. We all need 'em once in a while.

Boys Sailing & View Report

View from our bedroom. About 6am 

This past week was a cracker. The bakers baked & baked and baked and the orders continued to stream in, which is fantastic.  Tiredness on my part (something to do with hoiking cases of Heineken up steps. Don't ask) led to a few dark hours at the end of the week. This little video about artisanal bakeries lifted my spirits more than any cocktail could have.  There is something deeply satisfying about owning an artisanal business with happy customers. Long may it continue.

The boys had a good week settling in at St George's, which went well. It's a happy, traditional little school and seems to be just right for our boys.

Our 'baby' William turned eight this week. It feels like a bit of a watershed in a way: Boys are now out of the puppy stage and all thriving and growing. It is complete mayham trying to be the mother of three busy chaps and to keep up with the washing/judo belts/caps/shoes/homework etc, so most time I don't even try. They're good value for money however, which means we don't need things like TV's or a social life, as they provide enough entertainment to replace all of that. Tyler says he is going to say on his deathbed he wished he'd watched more television, not less as one is supposed to say.

No boy can ever have enough Lego.

The view is still there - as you can see - and there was very little sailing activity.

Good One



Caribbean Dinghy Champs 2013: Winners Team BVI

I'm officially sick of being miserable. A friend said to me this week "write a book!" and my reply was (after "when?") was "what about? It's so boring going on about how hard it is all the time".  I'd be like a Leonard Cohen soundtrack, although I believe he's cheered up now that he's in his Seventies. Hope yet, then.

I'm also pretty betwixt & between with this blog: 'What To Do With The Blog' is another refrain in my Leonard repertoire. The reality is that I have a lot of local readers and well, basically - the smaller the island, the blander the blog.

I made the silly mistake the other day of "unfriending" a couple of "friends" (not knowing you could just "switch off" "friends" - isn't virtual life fantastic?) which resulted in a fair amount of unsolicited vitriol. So unless I pretty much want to offend half the island, I will have to continue to write about the view and how tired I am. Not forgetting Children's Sailing, of course (see below).

Anyway it's been a pretty good week. James went off to Antigua as part of the BVI sailing team to compete in the Caribbean Dinghy Championships, and not only did Team BVI win, but James & his sailing buddy Sam came second in their class. Pretty bloody awesome, really.

We've also has some much needed new staff join us in the Bakery to help with our ever expanding traiteur range and to start preparing for Christmas, which is already giving me sleepless nights (oops, there I go again....."It's foooour oh clock in the moooooorning....." drones Leonard).

It's all fabulous.

We've also had to concede that homeschooling is for people who actually stay at home, unlike us, who don't. Georgie & William start at St George's Primary School tomorrow, where their father went.  St George's is an Anglican church school with an excellent academic track record following the British Caribbean Curriculum. It's in the historic part of Road Town in a brand new building,

St George's

but shares the lovely St George's Church Hall and grounds. Tyler still remembers listening to the bats in the bellfry during long assembly's.

The boys will be able to learn steel pan and also  how to spell properly and seem oddly excited about having to polish their shoes.  Given that they will be attending Diocesan boarding schools, St George's is going to be an excellent bridge, we feel.

We are sad however that homeschooling didn't work out: Our one month of the real deal (September) was a lot of fun and left me in no doubt that homeschooling gives kids a huge advantage. We will continue to learn French and some other stuff to keep us all on our toes.

The bakery is also rocking. I'm up to Florida later on this week to kick start Phase 2 in World Domination.

I'm still feeling a little heart sore about family but c'est la vie, life goes on.



Family

Eight years ago my family exploded after a series of heart-breaking tragedies. Within a few years most of us had moved from South Africa to the four corners of the universe: One to a remote mountain-side in New Zealand, one to the very outer suburbs of  Melbourne, one to Far North West Ireland to a tiny surfing village, us to a tiny dot in the Caribbean - with another on an isolated farm in Kwazulu Natal - and a few 'normals' in Cape Town and London.

It's sad that we are all so far apart. I almost envy the Kennedy's their Hyannis family compound, though in reality it's probably hell and the kids detest going there and it's all drama.

When we do get together it's a Big Treat, much anticipated and looked forward to. We've been counting down to seeing my nephew Myles and his wife Jane who visited us from Ireland this past week.  Myles & Jane run a very successful café bakery called Shells in Strandhill, Co. Sligo and more recently a deli/ gift shop. They've also just finished writing their second cookbook and are winding down from their Summer season.

Although we don't see much of each other, we get along famously due to our shared interests and history. So in amongst surfing and beach trips and restaurants, we chatted for hours and hours about lives, our families, recipes, children, our dreams, our frustrations, our fears, our hopes and everything else under the sun. We laughed hysterically at silly jokes, teased each other mercilessly, sang a lot and had a ton of fun.

Nothing is more important than family, surely? The feeling of being part of a clan is something almost primal and the sense of continuity and security is both self assuring and re-energizing.

This past week was truly a very happy week and we loved showing the island off as well - but all too soon it was over unfortunately, as we all get back to our busy lives.

We knew this was going to be our one small respite before the Season starts to take hold again, and we made the most of it.

In true family style.

 

Tipping Point

 

 

The Family Empire is growing

After a few very tough months, I'm pleased to say that the Tipping Point appears to have been reached. We've been super-busy again this week with the bakers cranking it out: On Saturday we reached 200 loaves by 7am - our biggest bake so far.

Starting up one's own business is really not for the work-shy or feint hearted. It' a bit like parenthood, which as we all know is the most democratic club in the world - even little Prince George's parents are novices, right now. As a former management consultant, this is all rather bemusing.  I think if a 30 year old sparkplug in a sharp suit tried to tell me how to run my business right now, I would probably kill them. Or challenge them to a Quick Books Marathon. 

So it's been a good week all in all, and we're back to conquering the world again. Kids have sailed during half term break, Tyler baked a lot of bread and I flitted around in my new little baby, Jim the Suzuki Island Car, soon to be  acquired.

We scrubbed up last night and went off to the Fish 'N Lime, our local fab place for dinner, to celebrate the afore mentioned tipping point. Luckily a large birthday party was also in full swing and so we got a DJ thrown in for good measure, and a good 'opskop' was had by all. Kids had to sleep in cars, it all got a bit silly and I think we staggered home about 2am.  Poor old Tyler was up again 3 hours later, back in the bakery and we also put in some spiritual duty, but we then got to sleep it all off at Little Bay, for a blissful afternoon on the beach with friends.

Island Life definitely has its perks. And fortunately everyone has to eat bread.



On the up and up

It's a long weekend and we still have Monday to look forward too. We've had the best day today. Although it may not look like it, that's William hard at play at a fundraiser today, island-style.

Chris & Alec: Rainbow Visions

Friends and Family joined the Andersons on Little Thatch, my 'happy place' in the VI,  to eat and drink and raise money for Alec Anderson & Chris Brockbank who are representing the BVI in the 2016 Olympics. They are super chaps, and our boys heroes.  Not a raffle or silent auction in sight, just a wonderful day with the boys going for hops on the 49, lots of snorkeling and limin' with good friends. I honestly could not think of a better way to spend a Sunday, could you?

 

It's been a good week in the bakery too. We've had our first 'Chef's Tables' - showcasing our food with a 6 course tasting menu for invited guests, with two more to go next week. Now that we've survived our first year and have shown that we can bake the odd loaf or two, we are positioning ourselves for the new season which is about to kick off at the beginning of November. It's the official end of the Hurricane Season, which means that the Snow Birds return and the yacht charters start up again and by all accounts, it is meant to be a good one - with bookings up considerably from last year. Once we get going, we'll be flat again until after Christmas (I'm already having Icing Biscuit nightmares) - so we're making the most of days like we had today.

The boys are all on half term break next week (yes including the homeschooled ones) and will be off sailing and doing boy-island-stuff.

We have a lot to look forward to including impending visits from family and hopefully good news about some plans we have for the bakery. James is also starting to prepare now for the Caribbean Dinghy Champs in Antigua on the 17th November, which is super exciting. 

We are most definitely on the up and up again.

Back

Apologies for the long break from writing, but I sometimes find it hard to share and care, given our present exigencies.But it's a Sunday morning and hey, we're all still alive and kicking, James is busy off winning regatta's over in St Thomas and it feels like a cooler morning today with a lovely, gentle breeze wafting onshore.

Trying to remain even vaguely human, let along civilized when the temperatures sore into the mid 30's and the humidity is 100% or close to, is just something I cannot seem to ever get used to: Sellotape doesn't stick, salt dissolves into water and the blood thickens in ones veins. I put aside all my Green credentials and embrace arctic air conditioning with alacrity and basically hide away until it cools down a bit.

The bakery is starting to pick up again after a fairly brutally quiet August and September. This is not an easy market (there is little homogeneity) and we are slowly learning how to respond to it. Apart from LIAT, food is the  topic amongst expats: The lack of it, the condition of it, the price of it, the general inconvenience of it all. Talking about food here is like talking about the weather in England ("chilly today, isn't it?"/"no plain yoghurt again, is there?") and one has to sometimes bite one's tongue and not mutter "it's a friggin island, not Surbiton". 

So we're proud to be part of a growing group of local food producers who are working hard to make a positive difference, but I would be lying if I said it was easy. Somedays it feels harder than hard. Hence no blog and a real desire to forgo reality and spend the entire day on Pinterest.

Homeschooling is also a bit of a misnomer at the moment, as frankly we havn't been home very much lately. We're working all hours to push the bakery into the New Season, and the World's Most Patient Boys are having to lug their books around wherever I may be. They deserve a medal for fortitude and have probably learnt more social and interpersonal skills than sums and spelling, but such is our life for now. All rather too pioneering for this gal, some days.

We also celebrated Georgie's birthday this past week with a Bear Gryll's Survivor party at Rogues Bay with 16 little boys and a couple of dads. I got to stay at home and watch as much Downton Abby as I could manage before falling asleep in front of the TV and the party was deemed a great success.

Anyway no peace for the wicked - it's time to "Spray & Pray" as my dearest friend Billy calls my grumpy Sunday housecleaning sorties. There is a weeks' load of washing to shove into various machines and little boys bathrooms to hose down. I usually feel mildly virtuous after a Domestic Session, but it takes a lot of loud music and quite a bit of swearing to get through it all.

Till next week. Promise.

World Peace, Bru

Our peace windmills. Photos & styling by George Dawson

 



I would love to say that our new routine has now kicked in and everything is running smoothly: Up at 6am. Early morning run. Schooling by 8:30am. Beautific little boys, eager to learn their spelling. Healthy lunch at Noon. Piano practice everyday.

We can all dream.

The fact that I'm hurriedly doing my blog posting on a Sunday morning (whilst listening to some awesome music - John Newman, Klangarussell, Daft Punk, Rudimentals) and have not done any other work on it as I'd previously intended to -  should give one some indication that as per usual everything is taking a little longer than it should do.

Plus it's been brain-numbingly, life-sappingly hot and humid. It's bang in the middle of our summer although we only have a few weeks of this and then it cools down a degree or two.

Anyhow I promise not to turn this into a homeschooling blog - they are almost without exception  ghastly but we did have quite a good week: Bear Grylls for geograghy and spelling (I learnt a new word: paracord) and then International Peace Day on Friday/Saturday - where we did a whole lot of stuff including poetry, making windmills and baking a love cake (you can see I'm avoiding maths).

Luckily I'm friends with quite a few teachers who are incredibly generous with sharing resources and experience (much needed) and I was pointed to the TES UK website, which I literally have open all day everyday, as it guides us through the UK National Curriculum. It has the most amazing links  which constantly sparks us in new directions, but I didn't think that we would find one of the best cakes known to mankind on it, which is what we did on Friday.

Alfred Prasard, exec chef at Tamarind, London joined forces with Peace One Day and Ocado (online Waitrose. Fabulous) and made this Sri Lankan delicacy,  a legacy from the Portuguese rule in Ceylon. It is heart-breakingly gorgeous and I can only encourage you to bake it. I'd love to say that we made it in the bakery and then handed it out, whilst showering rose petals and bestowing world peace on everyone, but it didn't get any further than our kitchen - until this blog, that is. Next year.

Pic from Marie Claire

Love Cake for World Peace Day

Ingredients:

150 g unsalted butter

350 g caster sugar

6 medium eggs

3 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons rose water

Grated zest of 1 orange

Grated zest 1 lemon

1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

200g pistachio nuts, chopped coarsely [optional]

250 g coarse semolina

50 g of glacé cherries [can be replaced with wine gums of jelly babies]

25 g of mixed peel

25 g of crystallized stem ginger

Icing sugar to dust

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 150˚C/300˚F and line a 25 x 30 cm (10 x 12 in) cake tin with baking paper.

2. Dice 150g of unsalted butter and leave in a warm place to soften.

3. Once soft, cream the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

4. Add in the eggs, one at a time and beat well.

5. Add honey, rose water, zest, nutmeg, cardamom and cinnamon. Use a spatula to gently fold through

6. Next fold through the nuts, semolina, glacé cherries, mixed peel and crystallized ginger until combined. Do not over mix.

7. Turn into prepared tin and bake in the oven for 1 hour or until pale golden on top. The cake comes out best in a slow-cook process and should ideally feel chewy on top and moist in the middle.

8. Allow the cake to cool in the tin for about 20 minutes.

9. Turn out of the tin, and when completely cool dust with icing sugar.



Floating World

Tyler and I snorkeled today for hours. The water is very warm at the moment (like about 28 C) and we swam through clouds of sparkling silver fish and watched little baby moray eels poking their heads out and fishies nibbling on the coral. 

I absolutely love the feeling of being suspended in water and entering into the magical,  Neptuney world of under the sea.  We met in the Maldives and our early courting was done whilst diving, with Tyler swimming ahead in his freedive fins which I thought deeply sexy and still do (guess what he got for his birthday) pointing out turtles and stonefish to me. Beats a disco anyday.

Luckily the children also share our passion for the sea and all swim and snorkel like little otters. When we arrived 3 years ago now, we had our 5 suitcases and our snorkeling clobber, which the kids had only really used in the swimming pool before. I think we were in the water within about 2 hours of arriving.  James is shortly to join us scuba diving, as his 12th birthday present was the PADI Open Water course and we are so looking forward to sharing this with him. 

It's when I remember things like this that I realize that we were probably destined to live in this place.

It really is a floating world.

Home + School

Thank goodness for TED-Ed.

Well this has been a rather different kind of week: Homeschooling. Something I had only had a vague notion of up until about 5 days ago, had done very little preparation for and certainly had no recognizable talent for.

First off I discovered that I couldn't literally think straight in our house. It's such a mess (yes, you Saffa Mama's - hard to imagine, I know) that I needed to tame that beast before I could think about the ABC's. So Week 1 of homeschooling was actually spent doing housework. We sorted out washing and boys cupboards and toy boxes and stuff like that, and the noble Kamla waged war with the Fabulosa and a mop and we now have something resembling a normal home. I'm sure the boys learnt something in all of that.

So this week has actually been Week 2.  And it's been a pretty steep curve, to put it mildly. "Just give me the syllabus" said my husband on Monday evening, as he is meant to take the controls for a bit on Tuesday. "Well we have the National Curriculum" says I, pointing to a very large file "but that only tells you what we need to achieve, and not really how to do it". There was rather long silence after that, with a bit of muttering too. Anyway he was too tired to teach so I think the kids just coloured in pictures or something on Tuesday. Watched TED, probably. Thank goodness for TED.

The text books have been duly ordered from England and are now awaited with much anticipation (by me mainly). In the meantime it's a bit all over the place. Some days have been quite structured and we've done maths and spelling and gripping stuff like that (I can't remember any grammar and I sit with my calculator) but most days it's all been a bit whimsy. We've done airplanes and jet engines since we'd just spent so much time in them (and watched a brilliant BBC film on the making of the A330). We also learnt all about New York and urban hierarchies and spheres of influence (how far would you travel to go to Peebles Hospital?) and today we did Superstitions because it was Friday 13th.

So I've learnt quite a bit this past week, although I'm not so sure about the kids. They dug out all their old schoolbooks today, for reassurance I think and to gently remind me that there is more to school than just the Discovery Science Channel.

What I've really learnt though, is how happy I am at home. Tyler has quietly given me the space just to pootle around here in Carrot Bay in our very beautiful house, re-educating myself in becoming a mensch again (oh yes, we also learnt about Rosh Hashanah as well).

This may make a sane (and educated) person of me yet. I have nothing but optimism about it all, despite not remembering what a syntax is, or what 9 X 12 is.

We are One Years Old!

 

On Thursday, the bakery had its first birthday.

The past year has felt like about ten years if the truth be told and has been harder than we could ever have imagined in our worst nightmares, so I am grateful that not only have we survived, but that we are thriving. The conventional wisdom of business start-ups is that it takes three years before you  begin to fly - so I say hallelujah to that and hopefully the next two years will be slightly less eventful than this past one and just as productive!

Although Tyler and I constantly berate ourselves that we havn't implemented half the things we wanted too yet, we have come a long way from the few loaves of bread we started out with and not much else.

We have lots and lots of ideas and plans that we want to run with and now that we have begun wholesaling we can soon start looking at expanding in to bigger premises and our range.

Despite the sheer blood, sweat and tears that it has taken to get going - I wouldn't change it for anything in the world. We're the masters of our own destiny with a wonderfully well-supported business that the local community have absolutely taken  into their homes and hearts.  We could not ask for much more than that.

Food for the soul: Babylonstoren

The Glass House (photo by Tazzer)

By far my greatest inspiration in South Africa was a visit to the wine farm Babylonstoren in Franschoek. It has everything that I love: Gardens, old buildings, bakery, good food, wine, refreshing style and a beautiful setting.

It is the life's work of Koos Bekker and Karen Roos, and is to wine farms what chic bush lodges like Singita and Londilozi are to safari style.

The Garden: Photo by Babylonstoren

We went on a garden tour of the several acres of organic kitchen gardens and it is amazing to see what has been achieved in just 4 years. I'm most encouraged to try a few herbs here again on the island, sorely needed for the bakery's sandwiches and new salad range.

 

 

The farm has two restaurants - The Greenhouse for light lunches - where we ate and Babel - a proper restaurant where I chatted to the chef and had a look at the menu - all seasonal and using local produce and from the garden. 'Babel' has had mixed reviews and is apparently hard to get into, but we'll certainly try the next time we're in Cape Town, for the visual feast alone!

 

 

Beautifully presented using the organic produce from the garden & charcuterie

 

 



 

If this isn't enough the farm also has a stunning bakery, a charcuterie, a wine shop (with the wine it makes on the farm) a deli with delicious things like olive oils and Weck jars and a cheesery - with lots of gorgeous local cheeses (Dalesford is next door).

 

 

 

 

Last photos by Tazzer. Blurry ones are mine



We visited in Winter, so we asked our garden guide which was the best time for the garden and he said this month, September, as it is spectacular in Spring with all the fruit blossoms and the flowering indigenous clivias - see below.

 

Clivias (photo by Babylonstoren)

 

 Babylonstoren really is food for the soul in every way and I've brought back a lot of fresh ideas to use in the bakery. It really is worth a visit the next time you are in Cape Town or a virtual one online.