The Best Recipe Ever (if you are a South African Emigrant Nostalgic baker)

Imagine you emigrated from the USA and ended up in some up-country South African town where people eat boere-wors and Nescafe Instant coffee.  Now you have children.  Instead of the cultured Starbukkers of your youth, they like Milo and anchovy paste on toast.  Your friends let them sip wine and shandies at braais.  What can you do?  Nothing, of course.  But to make yourself feel better you bake choc-chip-cookies and force-feed them pepperoni pizza for parties - imported pepperoni of course.

Well, my expat attempt to emphasize my children's colonial roots is The Crunchy.  If you fly SAA to South Africa, odds are you will get a crunchy with your tea or coffee.  They are served at parties, kept in the cookie tin, sent in lunch boxes and shared (chocolate coated) at Christmas.

Crunchies are the South African choc-chip cookie and now you too can enjoy them!

Here is a great recipe. from Orna Bakes website.  If the link is broken, ask me... I have a copy of a few versions.

I am waiting for my second batch to come out of the oven.  They take a while to harden and the kids keep coming to check "Are they ready yet?  Are they cool?"  Of course, I can't smell anything even this close but they sure look good.

Another good recipe is my aunt's recipe for klapperys (coconut ice).  You American's have no idea what I am talking about... you probably think its some kind of dairy-free desert or a coconut smoothie.  It is not!  It is about 50/50 desiccated coconut and sugar.  I shall post hers later (photostream glitch) but for now you have the web version.

Meanwhile
Wren and I went for a walk together to return books to the Free Little Library.  All around our neighborhood there are little outdoor book boxes where you can take or drop books.  I often read books from them - an odd and seldom curated mix - including When Bears Attack, fantasy novels, romance, scandinavian detective novels and whatnot.

On the way home Wren confided that his friend Piper had told him that her cat puked its intestines out and is now dead.  Did I think that was gross?  I said I thought it was gross.

This is why you must take your kids on walks - to find wild books and learn about gross secrets they have been keeping.