The canonical version and where to order it.
Cape Malay spiced dough balls, deep-fried, dipped in boiling syrup and rolled in desiccated coconut. Sold on Sunday mornings in Bo-Kaap, and not the same thing as an Afrikaner koeksister.
The koesister is a Cape Malay pastry with a cake-like crumb, spiced with cinnamon, aniseed, ginger, cardamom and dried tangerine skin powder, and the technique came to the Cape with people enslaved and exiled from the Indonesian archipelago from the 1650s. It is fried, cooled, cooked briefly in syrup and finished in coconut. The Afrikaner koeksister is a different pastry entirely: a crisp plaited doughnut drowned in cold syrup, with no spice and no coconut. In Bo-Kaap the koesister is a Sunday-morning routine, bought warm by the bag and eaten with milky tea.
1 editor pick for Koesisters in Cape Town, ranked by editorial score. All Cape Town signature dishes · Koesisters across every city.
Bo-Kaap Deli on Church Street sells Cape Malay koesisters to take away alongside burgers and light meals, a Muslim-owned stop in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town.
TipTake a bag of koesisters away with you, a Sunday habit in Bo-Kaap; on Friday and Saturday the deli stays open to 22:00.
Koesisters makes more sense with someone from Cape Town explaining it. These are the classes and tours we have checked, with booking links.
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