INSTANT CLASSIC: Veteran author delivers a baking bible for our time

Heilie Pienaar’s baking journey has been long and detailed, and is characterised by the consistent hard work that is her trademark. She is a baker’s baker – if a recipe is in her book, it has been tested and retested, and her followers know this. Her recipes are to be trusted.

Heilie came into my orbit this week, out of the blue. A mutual friend, Bella (Isabella) Niehaus (whose fabulous book I wrote about here), had recommended that she be in touch with me. So Heilie came through to my local coffee shop-come-branch-office and we met and chatted over rooibos tea.

At first I thought Heilie hadn’t really been on my radar, until I saw the cover of her second cookbook, published in South Africa as The Snowflake Complete Book of Baking (Struik), which dates back to 1994, and recognised the cover immediately. Because I own it. It’s high upon a shelf, forgotten. But now things have been put to rights.

That original stands today as a classic, so hang on to it if you have your mom’s or gran’s copy. The same book was published in the UK the same year, as The Complete Book of Baking.

Her new book, My Baking Journey, deserves to go the same route. (Her first was The SA Meat Cookbook in 1992, for the Meat Board, where she worked before moving to Snowflake.)

Her career has spanned corporate work at Snowflake, Pick n Pay, and Woolworths alongside a quarter century of international TV and feature film food styling. 

Ten cookbooks is remarkable. And the print numbers of some of them are astonishing, running into tens of thousands. Of the 10 cookbooks, eight are all about baking, and the remaining two about meat.

But the latest represents her life’s work and was the reason she had asked to meet me. I immediately checked for the publisher’s name. But this one, unlike her others, is all her own.

You’d never think it was self-published to look at it and page through it. This is because she is a consummate professional, and hired other professionals to produce the book. Lauren Rycroft as designer. Donna Lewis as photographer. It was printed and bound in Cape Town by ABC Press to a high spec.

Heilie, Lewis and the team shot the book across 11 non-consecutive days over a month, yielding about 140 photos.

It’s special. Comprehensive. As modern in design and feel as any other cookbook out there, despite its pedigree. Consider this: many cookbooks may have 100 or so recipes in them. Give or take. Her new book has 350-plus recipes. That number is rounded down, not up.

She’d been persuaded by her many fans – some of whom go all the way back to 1994 when that first book came out – that there was still a market out there for a great many of her recipes. Even the much older ones.

There have been other collections along the way. Too Fresh To Flop (now virtually her motto and sort of nickname) and The Complete Book of Home Baking, both in 2002. The Ultimate Book of Baking in 2007. Then, in 2012, The Ultimate Snowflake Collection (It’s the flour brand by the way – given the current meaning of “snowflake”, this is not to be confused with the easily offended), and now this truly kick-ass cookbook. It’s a milestone among South African baking books. I hesitate to say it has “everything” in it, but it kind of does.

There are many things that make it stand out. Not least, that she goes lightly on sugar. This is very clever: the complaint I hear most often about the older recipe books is that they are too heavy on the sugar, so she has put this to rights in one big, beautiful baking book. That alone should make it a new classic.

Like all of the best of the traditional cookbooks, it has conversion tables, an exhaustive recipe index and a lengthy glossary. Arguably even more impressive is her four-page introduction, “all you need to know about baking – recipes, techniques, tips and more”. It concludes in “guidance for baking at high altitudes”, which bears elaboration: “All recipes in this book were tested at sea level and need no adjustment up to 900m. Above 900m, lower air pressure can cause cakes to rise too quickly and the batter to weaken.”

The conversion tables on the following page begin with a guide for baking at high altitudes – for baking powder, sugar, liquid, and oven temperature. I live at the coast, but if you’re anywhere inland, you need this guide.

In 224 pages, Heilie Pienaar manages to pack in biscuits and rusks, batters, muffins and scones, sweet tarts, flans and pies, breads, sweet and ring loaves, dietary cakes, classic cakes and desserts, and Christmas and Easter collections. After a chapter of international dishes, there are the traditional South African recipes so many of us look for.

The cake chapters go on forever. “Sweet Loaves, Ring & Dietary Cakes” encompasses two Madeira recipes, six loaves (such as pumpkin and chocolate, egg-free rooibos and raisin, and marmalade yogurt loaf). There are gluten-free cakes too. 

Then, “Classic Cakes”. How about this: you love red velvet cake, right? It was Heilie who introduced it to South Africa in that first Snowflake book in 1994. That recipe is in the new book, alongside butter cake, hot milk sponge, light chiffon, Victoria sponge, carrot, moist chocolate oil cake, Swiss roll, apple crumble cake, angel cake, cream cracker cake (which is sweet and has almonds in it), cinnamon and nut swirl cake, orange and poppy seed, cappuccino coconut, sticky ginger, and apple and fruit “friendship cake”. 

Next are the decadent ones: Battenberg, “ultimate” cheese cake, red velvet, citrus layered cake, Biscoff drizzle, a pair of chocolate cakes, rainbow, and “funfetti”, which is all about rainbow vermicelli.

There are even savoury dishes – snacks and mains – including baked aubergine rolls, onion and asparagus tart, fish cakes, phyllo fish curry, chicken plait, luxurious biltong soup, and a chilli con carne roll. Plenty more.

So many breads. Wondrous sweet things: apple caramel tart, Bakewell (frangipane) tart, strawberry chiffon tart, chocolate pecan, and banoffi. And lemon meringue pie.

We haven’t even got to desserts. Baked Alaska. All the expected ones and some less expected. Got to try the “best ever chocolate sauce pudding”, the egg-free zesty lemon self-saucing pud, and the steamed sponge pudding with caramel sauce. 

The pastries chapter is a gem. Want to know how to make choux, flan or sour cream pastry? Soda water and hot water pastry (my own go-to), basic and rich shortcrust, flaky, puff, pasta dough and strudel pastry? All here.

Christmas and Easter offer fruity palmiers, a nostalgic trifle, panforte, stollen, panettone, hot cross buns, a rich dark fruit cake (and you can make it near the day, she says, urging us to pour the brandy over while it’s still oven-hot) as well as a quick boiled fruit cake and, yes, steamed Christmas pudding.

Not content with all of the above, Heilie throws in a few “special extras”: limoncello (yes, make your own), lemon curd, vanilla fudge, onion marmalade, and dried citrus slices.

Heilie has always done her own styling, and produced this work using a two-oven kitchen setup, prepping biscuits and rusks in advance while baking delicate cakes, pies, and desserts fresh on shooting mornings.

Unusually, the cover was planned first, and features a ring cake with chocolate and cherries, selected to symbolise a modern take on an old-fashioned classic.

Her career as a stylist has a life of its own, encompassing commercial film shoots for international markets (including in the US, France, and Germany) and feature films and series shot in South Africa, including Outlander, Warrior, and the acclaimed period series 1923, which stars Helen Mirren. The commercial work for foreign clients is done in her Cape Town home.

All other baking books in my collection are likely to be ignored now that I have this stellar work. DM

Buy her book online: www.foodstylist.co.za 

Follow Heilie on Instagram: foodstylist-cpt