Guy Mari-Louis - Cakes to Celebrate Love and Life

TO CELEBRATE LOVE AND LIFE Dedicated to Brian Hope Maximo Guy:
the next generation of our baking clanCALLIE MARITZ AND MARI-LOUIS GUY Estee Maritz (mom) for love, everything and all things. Chris and Claudia for loving us (but then again, its hard not to). Master baker, Riekie Booysens. Cobus van Niekerk for all the lovely props. Wallcoverings for awesome backdrops. Corne at Hertex for the gorgeous fabrics.

Osiers for the use of beautiful props, bits and pieces. Simon at Earthcote for beautiful, massive backdrops for Chapter dividers. Nieleen for running after all of the above. Bettie for cleaning up every days mess. Nicci at Aspen for fresh flowers and sticking around. Jackie Moore at Ingrid Moore for silk flowers.

Christian Costa and Nancy Briggs for trends and ingredients. Helen Cubitt for lovely flowers. Dalene and all at Bakers Emporium, Cape Towns best baking supplier. Ryno Reyneke for pics (and mostly keeping his shirt on). Beverley Dodd for art direction and gorgeous layout. Linda VIP de Villiers for the opportunity.

Petal for the inspiration for this book. Jeffrey Cheffrey for making it all look so easy. Dr Vosloo for being a mentor and a believer. Geraldine and all the staff at De Akker Guesthouse. Gifts for Guests for lovely treats packaging. Kobus Dippenaar for fab fabrics.

Home etc and Mr Price Home for continued support in providing props. Mari-Louis wants to thank Sonja Cant Bake, Wont Bake Barlow (for blackmailing her name into print). Callie wants to thank Louis Broodryk (inspiration for life!).

Please note that baking times may differ from oven to oven and for different heights above sea-level, so always check your cake towards the end of the baking time, either with a skewer (which should come out clean) or lightly press the centre of the cake by hand and feel for firmness. The best indicator for us is that when you can smell the cake in the kitchen, it is almost ready. Published in 2009 by Struik Lifestyle
Reprinted in 2010 P.O.

Box 1144 Cape Town 8000 South Africa
an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Company Reg. No. 1966/003153/07
Wembley Square, First Floor, Solan Road, Gardens, 8001 Copyright in published edition: Random House Struik 2009
Copyright in text: Callie Maritz and Mari-Louis Guy 2009
Copyright in photographs: Ryno/Images of Africa 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner/s. PUBLISHER: Linda de Villiers
MANAGING EDITOR: Cecilia Barfield
EDITOR: Joy Clack
DESIGNER: Beverley Dodd
PHOTOGRAPHER: Ryno
STYLISTS: Callie Maritz and Mari-Louis Guy
PROOFREADER: Tessa Kennedy
INDEXER: Joy Clack Print ISBN 978 1 77007 783 6
PDF ISBN 978 1 43170 270 1
Epub ISBN 978 1 43170 269 5

HEAVENLY, DELICIOUS, DECADENT, CRUMBLY, SWEET CAKES!So here, then, is our world in cakes ... We love cake because it is meant as a celebration of love and life. We eat cake to celebrate a birth, a christening, a union between two people, a religious festival with family and loved ones or the end of a beautiful meal shared with good friends.

The secret ingredient in any cake is not found in many baking guides ... love! All home-baked cakes are born from love. Love of baking, of creating, of giving. You bake a cake for someone because you love them, and it makes them and you feel special in the process. We want you to get back into the kitchen and bake with love and passion. Soon youll find that skill will follow.

Whether you are an accomplished home-baker or breaking an egg into flour for the first time, we invite you on a journey through life with cake. We want you to experience that moment of feeling like an alchemist when you mix together some eggs, butter and flour, add some heat, and see this magically change into smiles on peoples faces. That moment when you first realize that you can create a fantastic tasting cake, better than what you get from the shop, is indeed a revelation that we want all of you to experience. Our love of all things food, especially cakes, started in Room 9 of a small town West Coast hotel with a mother who took catering for large events and weddings in her stride, with a grandmother who was a master baker and always, always had fresh cake in the house, and a green-fingered father and grandfather whose combined gardens contained bananas, figs, avocados, lemons, oranges, quinces, plums, passion fruit, grapefruit, papayas, grapes and guavas. Naturally, most of these fruits feature in our recipes. Through being welcomed into the kitchen at an early age, baking taught us much about history (whose recipe is this?), science (the chemistry of baking), maths (measuring the ingredients remember, measure twice, bake once!) and geography (the origin of the cake and ingredients).

Our future dreams regarding travel and life centred around food. (Mari-Louiss first big assignment in Home Economics at school saw her create a Victorian Tea for Princess Caroline of Monaco. In later life she came quite close, serving royalty on a private yacht in Monte Carlo.) For our parents birthdays we would always cook up a storm, down to writing out menus from the fictional Cali-Mari Hotel. When we started travelling, our letters and calls to each other were first and foremost about food we had tasted in the different countries we found ourselves in. They say if you get far enough away, you will be on your way back home. Today we find ourselves back in the Mother City after all these years, having called many countries home and fallen in love with their baked goods.

Thus began Cakebread, the result of our lifelong need to do something together in the food industry. Our business has two branches: one as food stylists on commercials and for magazines, the other as designers of bespoke cakes for weddings, birthdays and corporate events. We believe that we design dreams and that our style reflects both our roots and contemporary ideas. We call it church bazaar meets high fashion. At Cakebread, our little boutique bakery, the aim is always to give our customers a product with this same distinct home-made feel. None of those replicate-a-thousand-times-a-day supermarket cakes for us.

No cake looks exactly the same as the next. We believe imperfection is perfection, as long as there is love in the cake. We believe that this is why our cakes taste so delicious. We believe that taste always matters more than anything. We believe cake baked with real butter, full-cream milk, sugar and fresh eggs in the warmth and comfort of your own kitchen is a lot healthier than shop-bought versions containing margarine, palm oils, emulsifiers, preservatives, stabilizers and modified this-and-that. Read the label on a packaged cake on your next visit to the supermarket, and you will realize why home baking is back with a vengeance.