Spring Cookery Class

We had a great Spring Cookery Class last Friday

Lots of food, fun and oven juggling!

The aim of our Cookery Classes is to look at some inspiring, new, seasonal recipes that you can recreate easily at home for friends and family.

We tend to make a meat main, fish main and vegetarian main, a salad, a cordial and a cocktail, a pud and a bake.  There is a tasting menu of everything we cook and you take home a recipe booklet of everything we've cooked and a few extras.

We enjoy chat about kitchen accessories, gadgets and last week I'd just taken delivery of some lovely freeze dried petals from Polly's Petals, which are perfect for decorating your Spring and Summer bakes.

Above are pieces of cakes wrapped up to take home, it felt just like a party minus the balloons!

Below are just a few of the delicious things we cooked

A Strawberry and Lemon Roulade

A Roasted Radish Salad

A Fish Pie

A Spring Zinger Rhubarb Cocktail

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Thank you everyone for coming and to Tara for being my kitchen assistant for the morning.

Christmas Cookery

We had two great Christmas Cookery Classes on Friday, plenty of delicious and interesting recipes to make for friends and family over the festive period. 

The brie above was very popular!

This is the Jewelled Festive Salmon

As we go through the recipes, you are served tasting dishes of each recipe cooked, so you can taste the flavours, we talk about presentation skills and at what stage recipes can be prepared ahead of time or frozen.

We always make a seasonal cordial and then turn it into a fizzy cocktail, this is always popular!

This was our brie wrapped up in it's puff pastry star studded blanket, freshly out of the oven, oozy and glorious.

We slow cooked a Beef Carbonnade with dijon toasties on the top, we made this first, as this requires a long slow cook and is a perfect dish to make 48 hours ahead of time as the flavours keep on developing.

Thanks to Colline for being my morning class assistant and to Marianna who helped in the evening, I couldn't have done it without them.

We finished with a really lovely gingerbread pudding served with vanilla ice cream.

We made lots of other festive flavoured recipes from side vegetables to a snowy chocolate cake .....

Thank you everyone for coming, enjoy your festivities and cooking this year!

Summer Cookery Classes

 

We've had some smiley faces at Treetops during June for our Summer Cookery Classes, both day and evening classes, both 3 hours long, full of delicious, new and seasonal recipes.

We ended up with a bit of a pink theme which I fully embraced!

We made a delicious raspberry and thyme cordial which we mixed with sparkling water and a scented geranium.

The night before the classes I picked the rose petals from the garden and massaged a sugar solution in with them and left them in a cool place overnight.

During the class I turned them into a gorgeous rose petal jam, I'd eaten this each morning on holiday recently and it's so good (costs £11 a jar in Fortnums)!

After each recipe has been cooked, either Susan or Bianca, my two brilliant assistants, bring along tasting dishes, so you can eat and drink as we go along!

Our Summer Cookery Class cake was a gluten free lime and coconut cake.

Vegetarian wise we had a halloumi and orzo salad, minus the halloumi it is a delicious feta and orzo side salad, perfect to take along to parties or to accompany bbq's.

Talking of BBQ's, below are some chicken meatballs we enjoyed, which can be made bigger to enjoy as burgers.

We made a few other things too, all of which were lovely bright, colourful and tasty.

You always need a 'show-off' piece and for Summer Cookery this was our beetroot cured salmon, look at the vibrancy!  The process for this starts 48 hours before you serve it.  

I always include lots of recipes that can be prepared ahead of time, as they are always useful and always asked for.

Our Raspberry and Thyme Cordial then blended with other ingredients to become a Rose and Raspberry Gin Cocktail which really was 'summer in a glass'.

Cheers!

We will be running this class once more this Summer with these recipes, Thursday 10 August, so if they take your fancy, please get booked in and come along to join us.  It costs £50 for the class and you get to enjoy a tasting menu of everything cooked, along with a cocktail and a recipe booklet to take home with you.

Book Here

Easter Weekend News

Wishing you all a Happy Easter, it's so lovely to have the sun out and enjoy being outside and in the garden.

Next week we have a Watercolour Class with Claire

"Boats in the Mediterranean"

It's going to be full of sunshine, blues and beautiful boats.

Come and learn some new skills and techniques enjoy a delicious lunch and relax with a lovely small group of people.  It's always a great day.

Tuesday 11 April

9:30am - 3pm

All of your materials, a 2 course lunch and a glass of wine are included.

£85

Just 3 places left.

Our next Watercolour Class isn't until June, when we will be "Watching the Storm" on Wednesday 28 June; learn how to add action, speed and atmosphere to your watercolours with softness of foam and fluidity of waves, it's a fun one!

Book Watercolour Classes

Towards the end of April we have our Spring Cookery Class.

This is on Thursday 27 April and you can choose from either a morning or evening class, it's demo style with tasting of all the food cooked and a recipe booklet to take home.

10am - 1pm

or

7pm - 10pm

£50

We will be covering seasonal easy dishes to recreate at home, both for family and larger groups of friends and family, we have mains, salads and vegetarian recipes, a delicious cake, a quick pudding and a fresh spring cocktail.

There will be plenty of tips shared, we really hope you can join us.

In our Online Shop we have a Spring Sketch Offer, for just £49.99 you can receive Claire's Watercolour Pad, made from high quality Saunders Waterford paper, the thickest sketch pad on the market, this ring bound pad is ideal for painting outside or on your holidays as it folds flat, and because the paper is so thick it can hold watercolour on both sides.

You also get 3 of Claire's Watercolour paints and a set of 5 Watercolour brushes.

You can buy it here

Whilst you are on the website, have a look at our Online Workshops, we have a great variety of Yoga and Art Workshops for you, perfect for this time of year is our Spring Yoga with Rachel and our Spring Blossom Watercolour with Claire.

Click for Online Workshops

Enjoy the rest of your weekend

Emily

Free From Cookery

We had a fun and interesting Free From Cookery Class last week which covered cooking with a whole range of ingredients that are free from gluten, wheat, dairy, soya, nuts and egg.

It was one of those classes where we were too busy talking and eating to remember to take photos!

But I did remember to take a photo of the egg free meringues being whisked

and take a photo of them as cute little meringue kisses fresh out of the oven,

they are a revelation and really delicious, you would never know they are egg free.

We enjoyed a delicious tasting lunch of fish pie, followed by flapjack pear crumble, a carrot cake and tasted the perfect gluten free pastry as little jam tarts.

We will be running this class again in September, watch out for it, it's definitely worth coming if you yourself have intolerances or allergies, or if you cook for family or friends who have.

Free From Cookery Class

We had a really interesting and delicious morning, for our Free From Cookery Class.

We covered most of the intolerant and allergy foods such as gluten, wheat, dairy, egg, soya and nut.

We looked at the variety of alternatives, spoke about the different places that are available to buy ingredients both instore and online.

We made some crunchy chickpea nibbles coated in spices with a starter of mackerel dip.

Our main course was a gorgeous fish pie, topped with both potato and sweet potato.

After the demonstration, there as a tasting lunch of all the food cooked.

These meringue kisses were a huge hit, especially when everyone discovered that they were #eggfree and were made from chickpea water aka Aquafaba!

We made perfect pastry and had some little jam and nut butter tarts.

The kitchen smelt delicious from the Carrot Cake, full of sweet smelling orange and cinnamon.

To finish with we had an apple and chocolate crumble, heavenly, served with dairy free ice cream or oatly dairy free cream.

Everyone went home with a copy of the recipes and full tummies!

I will be running this class again on Friday 23 November

6:30pm - 9:30pm

£50

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Next week we have our Monday morning Yoga & Meditation classes and our new Introduction to Papercutting on Thursday (2 spaces left).