Vetkoek made with Baking Powder for Lazy Sunday Nights

Face it, we've all bought the Woolies vetkoek, petite and bursting at the seams with tiny portions of curried mince-meat. However, you can't precisely make a meal out of them. Well, you can, but then the rest of the family suffer and starve. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, since we've discovered that hungry children are more likely to eat what's placed in front of them. That's the problem with raising gourmet kids - they end up with gourmet tastes.



This recipe, then, is for a lazy Sunday evening when the last thing you want to do is spend ages making something and yet the kids are starving and you need to throw food down their hungry throats as they circle, gannet-like and crying around the kitchen floor. The other option is simply to teach them how to cook for themselves (and the rest of the family, while they are about it), but the second option is more time-consuming than the first. That said, Saturdays and Sundays are now days the boys are learning to cook for us, and I keep on telling them that a) being able to cook impresses girls hugely and b) when they get to university, it is so much better if they can fend for themselves and that way they can get out of cleaning and other such stuff when in a communal house - and who wouldn't rather cook than clean, quite frankly?

Please note this recipe is a double one, made for a hungry family of five, with some left-overs for the next day - they store well, especially if refrigerated.

Easy Vetkoek Recipe

500 grams flour (4 cups)
42 grams sugar (50 ml or 10 teaspoons or 3 heaped Tablespoons)
4 teaspoons baking powder (20 ml)
1 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
500 ml boiling water (2 cups)
Oil for deep-frying.

Sift all dry ingredients. Beat the eggs up and add the boiling water - my husband does this by hand in small mixing bowl. Then add the still-hot liquid mixture to the dry ingredients. Beat with the egg-whisk attachment until there are no lumps as shown below:

Once the mixture is lovely and sticky, you have to manhandle it into a blob like shape which my husband does by twirling it around two spoons, and then drop it into hot boiling oil.

Not like this - the oil is not hot enough.

But like this (note all the bubbles in the oil):

Like chips, you make sure that the vetkoek are nice and brown on the outside and fully cooked in the inside.

Drain (we use a stainless steel colander that we pop on top of a dinner plate and it works just fine). Cut open. The insides should look like this:

Serve with curried mince (traditional option) or cheese and honey (lazy Sunday option):

Enjoy!

The kids tend to eat as they come out of the hot pan; their only problem is that my husband is the only one who can cut them up when still hot. He says that years of practise as a chef mean that he is able to override his hands telling his brain they're burning, personally, I think it just means he's burnt off half his nerve endings as a result of his years of being a chef. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that only he can cut them open when still hot and steaming, but there is something quite delightful about eating something so fresh and hot.