Chocolate Chip Cognac Cheesecake

By Chef Thobeka Shangase

I think like most people i love a little liquor in my bloodstream on any day. Being a chef we are taught at school how to drink and drink well. So drinking is a big and important part of my job/ from understanding wine pairings with food and also the flavour profiles of wines and spirits and what the add to dishes.

My great passion in life is the relationship between alcohol and desserts, i maybe be exaggerating but nothing works quiet as well as desserts and booze. It's the ultimate in decadence, adding a slosh of booze into desserts has a multitude of impacts and affects mainly flavour.

I have fond memories of getting wasted on jelly shots with custard, whipped cream and tinned fruit cocktail, or those weekends in tertiary where we would pour a whole of vodka into whole watermelon and served it with ice-cream.

Traditionalist believe that a small amount of alcohol must be added into desserts and it must be cooked to cooked away the alcohol and only keep the flavour. Me,I'm a purist, i like to taste the liquor in my desserts, i don't want to cook it away, i want it raw and lots of it, which is why i like adding alcohol into frozen desserts. You get it as it is. Now i say if i'm cooking for myself or my friends i could add up to 80ml of alcohol, which is more then a single shot, but if you're cooking for others go easy on them. Too much alcohol can ruin a dish, there has to be a balance, the play on sugar, spice, chocolate, fruit and booze is what i love the most, you must be able to taste all the other ingredients in order to get the full experience.

There's really quiet something into eating and getting drunk. It's so classy.

Which is why i created this recipe, a year ago i started drinking cognac and not only did i love it but i was happy to find out that cognac has notes of marshmallow, vanilla and orange. It's the perfect flavour profile for dessert especially chocolate, which is why i had the idea to combine it with cheesecake. And my Chocolate Chip and Cognac Cheesecake was born.

If you try this recipe, You're welcome in advance!

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice

By Chef Thobeka Shangase

If girls are made of sugar and spice I would want to be speckled with pink peppercorns.
I realize that I may be a little bold in saying this, but I truly believe that pink peppercorns are the next big thing in South Africa. These amazing pink jewels are my new secret ingredient in desserts. No you read right, I did say pink peppercorns, but I promise it’s not what it sounds like.

Pink peppercorns are not true peppercorns in the traditional sense; they are the dried berries of the Brazilian pepper tree and the Peruvian Peppertree. These berries got their name because well, they look like peppercorns and they too have a peppery flavour to them. Pink peppercorns are not to be mistaken with the ripened red true peppercorns, the Piper nigurm, which are more reddish-orangey in color, but their name is based on their colour. They are similar in spice and colour but pink peppercorns are very different, which is why I love them.

Peruvian Peppertree

Pink peppercorns are not solid like black pepper; they are light, fluffy and hollow and should be ground up with a knife and not a pepper mill because they will get caught in the mill.
Pink peppercorns have a citrus flavour and are very fragrant, they have the heat of black pepper but the deep fruitiness of chilies, they are the relatives of cashews and mango which makes them suitable for a variety of dishes especially desserts and fruits. It just offers desserts an element of contrast and warmth, it really balances out the sugar in the most wonderful way, and I can’t express it enough. It just makes desserts electric, it brings them to life. They are fabulous with ice-cream and chocolate, in desserts that are really rich it works wonders.

From left: Black, white, pink and green peppercorns

I have tried it with Turkish delight and it is heaven with the rose water, the spiciness just tempers that annoying floral-ness that comes from rose water. I also love it in fruit salads, In Durban we love pineapples dusted in chili powder and to make a new version of this popular street food, I replaced the chili powder with crushed pink peppercorns, a scoop of vanilla ice-cream with a sprinkling of pistachios on the side and it was delicious and so pretty!

Pink peppercorns are the perfect secret ingredient and it goes well with every kind of dessert you can imagine, if a dessert is very sweet use the pink peppercorns to bring down that sugar, if a dessert is lacking that POW factor, throw in some pink peppercorns and it will come alive.
The French have been using pink peppercorns in desserts for decades and it’s about times us South Africans got on the pink peppercorn wagon.

Bread Pudding Cake

By Chef Thobeka Shangase

I love cake, but I hate bread pudding. There’s something about soggy bread that just makes my stomach turn.  But we serve a lot of bread pudding where I work and so I am forced to be around bread pudding a lot. I’ve tried bread pudding from donuts, thinking I love donuts so I might like it with donuts, no, I hated it.

My problem with bread pudding is its texture, the texture is just strange and unpleasant to me after all it is soggy bread. So if I can change the texture of bread pudding, I could like it. I think.

When I hate a food, like as much as I hate bread pudding, I feel the need to find a way to make it better so I can somehow be able to keep it down. Bread pudding has been one of those foods that have been like a monkey on my back. No matter what I have tried with it, it hasn’t been good to me, others have loved it but I haven’t liked it. I have yet to conquer the Bread Pudding Demon.  
So when I had the sudden idea of creating a bread pudding that eats like a cake, you wouldn’t believe my excitement. My toes were tingling I was so excited.

Initially I thought of making a cake batter and then layering the batter with bread soaked in egg custard in a baking tin and bake it all together, so the bread would bake into the cake and meld into one almost like a crumb cake but a bread pudding cake. The result was great but the bread pudding was missing its signature moist, pudding-ness. But this is an idea I will have to explore further later because it promising to me and it has potential.

I decided to try and simplify things, take things back a notch and think home cooking instead of restaurant cooking. I decided to take the bread out of the equation completely and use an alternative; I still wanted a cake so I thought of using a Madeira loaf or pound cake. This makes complete sense because for trifles I like using Madeira cake because it’s dense and it tastes great with custard, it can take a lot of moisture. So that was the base of my bread pudding cake.
I love it when a good idea comes together.

Bread Pudding Cake

1 loaf vanilla Madeira Cake/Pound Cake
100ml caster sugar
440ml milk
220ml cream
5ml vanilla essence
4 eggs
 Butter
100g sultanas
100g white chocolate, chopped
Topping
100ml whipping cream
100ml sour cream
Dark chocolate

Crème Anglaise
150ml milk
150ml double cream
10ml vanilla essence
4 egg yolks
60ml caster sugar

Preheat oven to 180⁰C. Slice the cake into 1cm thick slices, place on a greased baking sheet and bake in the oven for 8 minutes, this is to just dry out the cake not to cook it, so no colour, just dry. Remove it from the oven, turn of oven and leave the cake to cool.
Cut up the cake into bite size cubes.

In a bowl whisk together the eggs, cream, milk, vanilla and sugar. Add in the cake cubes and press in to soak into the custard. Place in the fridge to soak overnight or for 2-3 hours.

Preheat oven to 160⁰C. Grease a baking dish with butter or ramekins and set aside. In the custard soaked bread, fold in the sultanas and white chocolate and then spoon in the soaked bread into the baking dish. If your using ramekins, fill it up to the top so when it cooks the bread pudding will puff up over the top nicely, kind of like a soufflé.

Place in the oven and bake for 35-40 minutes. The custard should be set. Remove from the oven and place aside to cool down.

Crème Anglaise

Place the milk, cream and vanilla essence in a pot and bring it to the boil.
Put the egg yolks and caster sugar in a bowl and whisk together. Pour the hot milk into the eggs a little at a time to temper the eggs while whisking, when the eggs are warm, pour the egg mixture into the pot. Stir the custard and cook it at a low heat until it thickens, stir it continuously. The custard should coat the back of the spoon.

In a clean bowl pour in the whipping cream and whip it until it starts to foam up, add in the sour cream and continue to whip until it’s stiff and holds its shape.

In a bowl, pour in 60-80ml of crème anglaise, pour it in the middle and then move around the bowl to swirl the custard so it’s even on the plate. I used ramekins for my bread pudding cake and so I ran a knife around the inside of the cake and then I turned it upside down on top of the crème anglaise. Place a dollop of the whipped cream on top and grate over some dark chocolate on top.

Chef!

By Chef Thobeka Shangase

The life of a chef is unnerving at times. To be the iconic ideal of a chef you have to work late into the evenings, in sometimes seriously hostile anti-female kitchens while beyond the kitchen doors customers indulge in a variety of substances barked obscenities on the restaurant floor, and all of this with a middle aged head chef screaming in your face for every order.

Being a working  female chef is definitely not for sissies, I, like many others are nevertheless inspired by the jobs dual nature, the gritty and rawness of life in the kitchen makes a good dose of old school glamour and swank delivered on artistically crafted plates seem all the more necessary.
But I think as chefs we need to get our heads out of this pre-prescribed ideal of a chef, we all aspire one day to be a head chef, own our own restaurants, write about food or talk about food on some platform.

I want to be more than just a chef; I want to be an icon, a brazen, in your face figure of excellence and creativity but not just in the food world. I no longer want to be called a chef; I want to surpass all laws of gravity blur all industry lines and smash all boundaries, I want to be regarded as an artist.
Fashion designers create wearable art for the masses and I create edible art. For the masses But being in a world where the word artist is thrown around more than a free prostitute, the word artist doesn’t quiet carry the weight it used too. Now days a pop star who doesn’t write, compose or produce their songs is still called an artist where as I who takes a bunch of fruits, vegetables and pieces of meat and creates an entire dish which is  well thought out, perfectly balanced, composed in color and texture, well rounded and tastes great ,I am not called an artist.

Creating great food requires a certain level of science, craftsmanship and skill. This is the amount of focus and dedication I apply to every dish I produce, so why am I not called an artist?
This job is all about being daring, grime, glamour and very unattractive uniforms… living the dream!

Dark Chocolate, Caramel and Bacon Cake

By Chef Thobeka Shangase

This one is going down in the history books! Hold on to your apron strings folks, I haven’t lost my mind. Your eyes do not deceive you, I didn’t make a typing error, I really mean it, its chocolate, caramel and bacon!

Before you throw your baking pans and whisks me, remember that bacon makes everything better, so why not cake?! This is a valid question I am posing to you Sugar Freaks.

Pig tastes really good smothered in chocolate. We all know that we have to season our desserts with salt, the combination of salty and sweet is hard to resist and one I love very much, salted caramel is a classic example of this combination.

So after being introduced to chocolate covered bacon recently, my taste buds were forever changed, when I bit into that chocolate covered piece of swine, there was an explosion in my mouth, a million sensations firing all at once.

This was a taste I had to replicate immediately. I went home and the first thing I thought of was chocolate cake, I wanted to create a truly decadent and gluttonous feel to this dessert, so I decided to use my classic dark chocolate cake recipe as a foundation for this cake.

Then to kick up the yum factor I wanted to add on something else into this cake that would really drive home the sweet and salty theme I was going for and it was obvious to me, caramel.

Bacon, chocolate and caramel, these have to be some of the most sinful foods known to man kind and I was going to put them in a cake.

Why a cake? Everybody loves cake and I felt that the bacon would some how make the cake moist, like how some people wrap chicken with bacon to keep it moist during cooking. I don’t know if that was the case or not for this cake, but in my mind I was convinced it was going to work out this way.

My sister loves the salty sweet combination, her favourite snack is Nik Naks and banana’s eaten together and she loves bacon, so she was the perfect lab rat for me to test out this cake.

Result?: excellent

Two gold stars for me.

Sweet Beginings: Brandy and Cola Chocolate Cake

By Chef Thobeka Shangase

I created this cake to enter the 2013 Sunday Times Food Weekly: The Best Tasting Chocolate Cake Competition. This was my very first food competition that I had entered and I was thrilled to have been selected as part of the top 6 finalists, apparently 650 people had entered and they selected my cake as part of the top 6. I was thrilled to bits!!

Being part of this competition was an adventure for me and it allowed me the opportunity to get my fingers wet and introduced me to the world of food competitions.

I didn’t win the competition; the only thing I got was a cool ass Whirlpool microwave oven and a new found will and passion for desserts and competitive cooking.

Thobeka at her bake off stand

It took me 20 minutes to formulate the entire recipe from start to finish. I wanted to keep it very simple, knowing that a bake off would be involved and I didn't want to do anything complicated and fussy. The cake is made up of three simple elements, the cake, drizzle and icing. I decided to use a simple basic chocolate cake recipe that I’ve been making for years for the cake part and because it was for a competition I wanted to make it really special and make it a celebration cake. So I had the idea to make mix a brandy and coke cocktail and simply pour that over the cake and to also use the drink in the icing as well to yumify the whole cake and make it an experience to eat.

Thobeka with her Brandy and Cola Cake

This cake has an insane yum factor and I’m pretty sure that the cake gods were with me when I was creating this cake recipe and I’m not just saying that because it’s my creation, it’s because it actually really is yum. Everyone I have served it to loves it.

I’m particularly proud of this recipe because it’s my baby, it’s what started it all for me and it will forever have a special place in my heart. I hope you all love it as much as I do.

Best Damn Chocolate Chip Drop Biscuits

By Chef Thobeka Shangase

I don’t like a crispy biscuit, I prefer to bite my teeth down on a soft biscuit and these cookies are just that. They are the best damn cookies without a doubt, I love these to bits, and they are awesome. They’re soft, slightly chewy and loaded with chocolate. The secret ingredient in these cookies is the instant pudding mix that is what gives them their amazing texture and softness.

I like to make them a little extra special by adding in a variety of chocolate chips, I add in dark chocolate chips, with semi-sweet and milk chocolate chips. The combination of these is outstanding because you have the dark bitter chocolate which is then balanced of by the sweet milk chocolate and the semi-sweet chocolate just makes the transition from rich bitterness to sweetness a lot easier.

This is sheer indulgence and is a labour of love, but if you don’t feel like doing it my way, because lets face it this is an expensive exercise, rather add 4 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips into the mixture and it will be just as great.