Forest of heavenly pastries
GERMAN CONFECTIONERY: MADE PRESERVATIVE-FREE AND AS NATURALLY AS POSSIBLE
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she enters the Black Forest.
It’s said that those who enter the Black Forest emerge changed for ever. This is a tiny four-seater café. Both tables are covered in mutti-style green cloths with red checked squiggles and alpine flowers. The chairs are bentwood. A step beyond the tables takes me to a large glass-fronted display cabinet, in front of which a seemingly unceasing, but ever-changing group of people are pointing and leaving with loaves, rolls, Chelsea buns.
Braamfontein has many bakeries and I thought I had been to every one, but I had not visited the Black Forest until now.
Beyond the counter, when the inner door opens, I catch warm, yeasty whiffs and glimpses of men shovelling rye loaves into a glowing oven. Counters of cakes stand ready for deliveries to supermarkets, hotels, restaurants.
Even I know about Maisie who’s been at the Black Forest for almost as many years as the Speer family has owned it, which is about 40. She holds forth behind the counter in various languages, including German, as customers seek their moist Komiss bread, honeycomb rolls, spelt bread. A girl with a cat on her hat buys an apple custard and a German woman from Glenhove tells me Maisie is an angel and leaves with the famous real sourdough rye.
Heather and I settle for what must be the cheapest real coffees in town at R8 and a huge mandelbrezel, a giant crisp knot sweetened with apricot jam, lightly iced and flaked with almonds. I notice that everything at the counter is for giants: the croissants, pastry slices and even the petit fours.
The wall features graphic fir trees and although it’s cold, we’re cosy this side of the green gingham café curtains. Giant salted bretzels hang above the counter.
Owner Maike VandereydtSpeer shows us into the bakery. The original Werner Speer was from Pforzheim, known as the gateway to the Black Forest. Everything is made from scratch, preservative-free and as naturally as possible.
I emerge wiser. Because of supplying supermarkets, I’ve assumed this to be another so-so bakery. Now I know that two of my favourite places, both fussy about sourcing and purity, Love Food and Father Coffee, get their breads here.
In Grimm brothers’ tales, you leave a trail of crumbs to guide you back out of forests. In the Black Forest’s case we leave the crumbs on the way out, to guide us back again.
Black Forest Bakery 102 Juta Street, Braamfontein