Not everything worth keeping is kept the right way.
When Pieter and Viljoen de Kock began sorting through their mother’s belongings after she passed, they expected documents. Files. The practical administration of a life lived fully.
What they found, between the folders and the paperwork, changed everything.
The Recipe Books
Dottie de Kock kept recipe books. Not printed collections, not neatly organised ring-binders. Handwritten books — ink on paper, notes in the margins, corrections in different colours, pages worn soft from decades of use.
And tucked between them: small pieces of paper she had carefully pasted in. Some of those notes came from her own mother.
You could trace a line back nearly 100 years. Methods passed down. Adjustments made by hand. Measurements written from memory. Practical baking wisdom shaped over generations — not from culinary school, not from cookbooks, but from kitchens and from women who knew exactly what they were doing and why.
In those pages, Pieter and Viljoen did not find recipes alone. They found history.
The Decision
The books could have stayed in a cupboard. Most things like this do.
Instead, Pieter and Viljoen de Kock made a different choice. They would bake the recipes alive. Not as a gimmick. Not as a marketing line. As a continuation.
Every batch of MyKoekie™ cookies carries a thread of that history. The way ingredients are handled. The way texture is built. The patience in the process. These are lessons you do not learn from trends. You inherit them.
That is the difference between MyKoekie™ and any other cookie brand in South Africa. The recipes are not invented. They are inherited.
Dottie De Kock: Who She Was
Dottie de Kock passed on 8 April 2025 due to dementia. She was, by every account, a pioneer.
A woman who believed life should be shared with laughter, with food, and with the people around you. A baker who kept notes in margins and improvements in different inks. A mother who taught her sons, through the act of feeding people, that care is a form of love.
MyKoekie™ is a tribute to her. Not in name — in practice. In every handcrafted cookie, in every gooey centre, in every MK Shortbread Medallion pressed by hand before baking.
She is baked into all of it.
The Legacy That Continues
Later this year, MyKoekie™ plans to publish a special recipe book featuring Dottie’s original handwritten recipes. Not rewritten. Not modernised beyond recognition. Preserved with the character and authenticity they deserve — the corrections in different inks, the notes in the margins, the small pieces of paper pasted in from another generation.
This is how the legacy stays alive: through flour on hands, through ink on paper, through recipes that refuse to be forgotten.
What This Means for Every Cookie You Order
When you order a MyKoekie™ cookie, you are not buying a product that was invented in a focus group and tested for mass-market appeal.
You are ordering a recipe that was written by hand, refined over decades, passed from mother to son, and baked daily in a Cape Town kitchen by people who take that responsibility seriously.
That is what a nearly 100-year baking legacy tastes like. And that is why — once you have had one — you will understand why it is impossible to go back to anything else.
Taste Dottie’s legacy → mykoekie.com/shop
Read the full story → mykoekie.com/our-story
