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Kookmelkkoek (Boiling-milk-cake)

Kookmelkkoek (Boiling-milk-cake)

Nathalie Coetzee
December 9, 2016
1 Comment

This project shows the process of baking a family cake recipe of my great-grandmother. The little girl is a depiction of myself and the zine shows the process of making the cake. I used to eat the batter and wouldn't always have enough left to actually bake it. The cover of the zine reads "KOOKMELKKOEK", which translates as Boiling-Milk-Cake.



As a little girl this was the cake recipe my mother would always make. It has a few variations but the process is always the same. My mother told me the story behind the recipe since it wasn't found in a cookbook but rather written out on a piece of paper. My great-grandmother had this recipe and even won a contest with it back in her day. I still vaguely remember my great-grandmother and the kind of woman she was, everyone always has stories about her and how loving and caring she was. I decided on this topic for a project I did at the Academy where I was studying because family is important to me and I wanted to pay tribute to the women in my life by Illustrating this well known family recipe. I used the style I did because it was different to what you would usually see recipe's illustrated as which is in water-colour, and because it is vector which is a modern style, it also shows the continued existence of the recipe.


I worked mainly in Adobe Illustrator. I did start the planning by painting a few objects and characters on paper with gouache which I then translated into vector shapes in Adobe Illustrator. I started with the background which is the kitchen and worked out the process of the recipe by remembering how I would usually make it. From beginning to end it starts with a cupboard and a fridge where the ingredients are and moves on to where I (as a child) start by whisking the eggs and sugar then sifting in the dry ingredients. The next step was at the stove where the butter and milk is boiled together which then gets added to the rest of the ingredients. By this point the batter is ready and should be baked but there isn't enough left for that. When I looked at this process I had to make all the ingredient objects and the utensils used for this recipe. Lastly I made the character. This was the most difficult of all because I had to illustrate myself and my earlier paintings didn't look right. In the end I created the character solely in Adobe Illustrator.






I found that people said it was an interesting way of illustrating a recipe. I did learn a lot from this project, especially in the style I was working. I realized that working in vector with no reference I can create characters unlike when I paint them.

Nathalie Coetzee

I really enjoy working in vector and I also like digital painting. I am mostly self-taught and I hope to keep improving myself.

I am a recent graduate and I am currently residing in South Africa.

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