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!

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.