Classes
Read on for all the latest news and information on our cooking classes and courses. Find out about new classes, chef spotlights, behind the scenes insights and much more!
A Quintessentially British Affair: Afternoon Tea
Book Ultimate Afternoon Tea Class at Cookery School
The history of Afternoon Tea
The concept of ‘afternoon tea’ first appeared in 1840 when Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, became hungry around four o’clock in the afternoon. Dinner was not until around eight in the evening, so the Duchess asked for a tray of tea, bread and butter and cake to be brought to her room during the late afternoon.
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Classes
World Chocolate Week
It’s World Chocolate Week which means we can discuss one of our favourite topics. At Cookery School we have one huge proviso when it comes to chocolate – it has to be 100% slave free. Sadly this is still a major issue for many chocolate brands and is why the chocolate that we use at Cookery School is always ethical.
Our favourite chocolate is Original Beans.
Half Term in the Cookery School Kitchen – a special offer
Our Half Term Cookery Class will turn your teens from baked beans to brilliance!
And just like that the ground is littered with leaves and conkers, shops are filled with Christmas paraphernalia and pumpkins get their moment. We start to crave soups, stews and warm baked goods and half term is just around the corner.
Book two places on any class during the last week of October,
The Christmas Gift That Keeps on Giving
Cookery for Christmas – the most delicious of gifts
Cookery classes make the most creative Christmas gifts, that keep on giving. Why not try one gifting of the following classes…
Flavours of the Middle East have infiltrated our palates, cupboards and Saturday morning rituals over the last ten years, Our Modern Middle Eastern class inspires cooks to make food from the Levant at home.
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Classes Cook's Certificate
Christmas at Cookery School
Celebrate Christmas at Cookery School! Join us this December for our Christmas classes and learn to cook, bake and decorate for the festive season. Each class is a celebration of delicious Christmas food, tradition and festivity. There’s something for everyone including children with a penchant for holiday fun in the kitchen.
Christmas Baking from Around the World –
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Classes
New Austrian Strudel Masterclass
Our new class celebrates the beautiful 17th Century Austrian dessert, the strudel.
The Viennese strudel is the star of the show when it comes to creating layer upon layer of the finest dough encasing a sweet seasonal fruit filling. We make our strudel dough with organic Shipton Mill flour, egg, melted butter and warm water, aiming for a delicate light and super stretchy dough.
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Classes Newsletters
Midsummer Corporate Events
Midsummer was a time of corporate partying at Cookery School at Little Portland Street and we hosted a good number of wonderful events this July. What surprised and thrilled us was the fact that after each we had reviews from every company with whom we had worked. Below are a selection of them. It is worth pointing out that for most of them we provide only their quotes.
Last Week in the Kitchen
WE HOSTED several corporate events who all chose Spanish and Italian menus.
WE COOKED delicious dim sum and pastry chef Maddy made sponge biscuits for tiramisu, aided by Louisa, our work experience student who has joined us as part of her school programme.
WE LEARNT that snake beans and long beans are the same thing. We bought them from two different shops and found that they were same ingredient in both cases!
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Classes Cook's Certificate Corporate Courses
Cook more and cut back on plastic
It’s Plastic Free July and we remind ourselves that less than 10% of the plastic we’ve produced has been recycled (ever)! Time for a revolution and a plastic solution? We think so.
In fact, we think that cooking confidently is a big part of the solution because the more convenience foods, ready meals and takeaways we buy, the more packaging and plastics we consume.
Boost your kitchen confidence with our summer sale!
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Classes Newsletters
Education, Education, Education (fun, fun, fun)
Inspiring, empowering, healthy, sustainable, upskilling and most of all FUN.
That’s the power of cookery education and we believe that everyone should be given the opportunity to learn to cook.
During half-term we hosted a puff pastry workshop for Antonia Lloyd, Women in the Food Industry Ambassador. The workshop was for her daughters and their friends and it was just brilliant,
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Classes Newsletters
Corporate Chocolate Masterclass
Discover our Corporate Chocolate Masterclass at Cookery School at Little Portland Street.
When Cookery School started twenty years ago, a youthful aspiring chocolatier, Paul A Young, who had just left working as Head Pâtissier for Marco Pierre White, with ambitions to start a first rate chocolate business, joined us running our chocolate making classes. The rest is history as Paul established himself a chocolatier par excellence with a now very distinguished career and many awards to bear this out.
Why Cookery School is different
We have looked back over the past twenty years and discovered that our original values still hold good at Cookery School at Little Portland Street.
Good Home Cooking
Our most important aim is to teach good home cooking. This is our core value. We do not do ‘trendy’ and follow the fads that are taking over social media. We stick to a well trodden path, follow the science and from that emerges some of our classes.
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Classes
Covid-19 Safety Precautions
Since the arrival of the pandemic we have been working towards making the kitchens as Covid-19 secure as we can. Having opened safely in September 2020 we have everything is in place for our re-opening on 17 May 2021!
We ask everyone coming to Cookery School to advise us if they have had a high temperature, developed Covid-19 symptoms or have been in contact with a person with Covid-19 symptoms in the last 14 days.
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Classes
Gain Comfort in Comfort Food
Comfort food is food that provides a feeling of well-being, the dishes are typically high sugar or carbohydrate content and tend to be associated with childhood or home cooking. Not all comfort food is bad for you, our Founder Ros believes that homemade comfort food can be healthy as recipes can be easily altered for example reducing the salt content.
Comfort food favourites
In the UK research has shown the simple and classic pizza is the number one comfort food!
Latest News – 2nd Lockdown November 2020
Having re-opened on 1 September after making our Little Portland Street kitchens as covid-secure as possible, we were able to run courses and classes and were constantly told by students that once they entered our kitchens, they felt safe and were surprised how they relaxed and enjoyed cooking with us. With the safety of everyone at Cookery School being of paramount importance, those messages have been like music to our ears!
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Classes Uncategorized
Interactive Cookery Classes through Zoom
If you have ever wanted to experience the values of our Cookery School in your own home, you can now use the lockdown period for this. Our founder, Rosalind Rathouse, is putting over 50 years of teaching to perfect use and helping to demystify cooking with interactive cooking classes that remove jargon and celebrate good home cooking skills.
It’s the ideal way to use your time at home to master specific techniques such as learning how to make perfect puff pastry from scratch,
COVID-19 update from Cookery School
Like everyone else, we have been sorely tested over this Coronavirus epidemic and, despite the fact that many of our students are still happy to attend classes, having read the government advice, we have decided that it is probably in everyone’s best interest to close Cookery School until it is safe to reopen again.
We intend to put on a raft of new dates for classes and courses that have already been booked starting from Wednesday 18 March.
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Classes
A Mother’s Day Gift you can both benefit from
Miss those childhood days of cooking with your Mum? Want to spend some quality time with your mum, where you can have fun and learn together? Our Mother’s Day Offer could be the good news you’re looking for. This Mothering Sunday, treat both your mum and yourself to one of our cookery classes. Book one of our many practical classes for yourself and bring your Mum along at 50% off.
We offer a range of day and evening cooking classes for all ages and abilities,
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Classes
Christmas Baking with Dan Lepard
With a dramatic increase in independent bakeries in the last five years across the UK and as our love affair with Great British Bake Off continues, the rise in professional and home artisan baking seems to be here to stay.
For over a decade we’ve been baking with award-winning baker and food writer Dan Lepard, who has inspired and taught thousands of students coming through the Cookery School doors.
Due to the mad rush to get onto our Christmas baking class we added an additional date – the 15th December,
Choose ethical chocolate this Christmas!
At Christmas time, when we’re all thinking about chocolate, we wanted to mention that we’re full of beans about ethical chocolate!
Chocolate, which most of us take for granted, often has a slightly bitter aftertaste, not because it’s 85% cocoa but because the industry is a complex global supply chain which often results in cocoa farmers, particularly children, losing out. Chocolate is a luxury and we should be able to pay fairly for such a delicious treat.
Chef Spotlight: Chantal Coady OBE
We’re so excited to be welcoming the mother of English chocolate to the Cookery School kitchens this Christmas for an exclusive chocolate class! Chantal Coady established Rococo Chocolates nearly 40 years ago and since then, had led The Real Chocolate Revolution from the front. She’s done so much for the industry that she was awarded an OBE for services to chocolate!
We sat down with Chantal Coady to find out what excites her most about chocolate and received a sneak peek of the tips she’ll be revealing at our Christmas Chocolate Masterclass on December 3.
Four tips for kids in the kitchen
Here at Cookery School, we love seeing kids in the kitchen! Cooking is such a great way to learn and encourage creativity – especially if there’s a delicious dish at the end.
If you have a curious and culinary-minded child, here are our top tips to get them cooking in the kitchen.
Use recipes that you know work
Do not be tempted to go online to find recipes as often,
Class Diary: Cook’s Certificate
Jamie McGurk recently participated in our professional Cook’s Certificate course. Here, he explains his experience over the six-week course.
It’s fair to say elaborate and expansive cooking at university is a rare and laborious feat. During my studies, my dinners were usually simple chicken and rice, followed by a couple of Deliveroo meals and some oven chips in between. Whether it’s down to the laziness of a second-year student,
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Classes Cook's Certificate
Introducing…our new cooking classes!
In between our classes, courses, Cook’s Certificate and corporate events, we’ve been working on something very special in the Cookery School kitchens – a whole batch of new cooking classes!
Check out what’s on offer in 2020 and do let us know if there’s any new cooking classes that you’d love to see on our menu.
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Classes
Class Diary: Cake Decorating
Our burgeoning baker, 13-year-old Marly Tashmina, is continuing her culinary foray with cake decorating. She explains what she learnt in the three-hour class.
I recently attended a cake decorating class at Cookery School. I bake quite a lot in my spare time and I was really excited to attend a detailed class like this.
The chef was incredibly engaging and brought a welcoming and fun atmosphere to the room.
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Classes
Class Diary: French Breakfast Pastries
13-year-old Marly Tashmina recently participated in our French breakfast pastries class, where she made croissants and a variety of other treats. She reveals what she learnt.
This was my fourth class here. I was very excited as I had never made any croissants or French pastries ever before.
When I arrived, there was a really nice atmosphere. We had some drinks and delicious food. The chef was incredibly inviting and started by introducing the ingredients that we would be using.
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Classes
Chef Spotlight: Freddy Gangemi
Our fantastic team of chefs are the experts in all things cookery, leading the majority of our diverse classes. However, every now and then, we welcome a guest chef to share their specialist knowledge far and wide. Just one of these is Freddy Gangemi, an Italian native that leads our Roman and Sicilian classes. We sat down with Freddy to find out what he loves about cooking and the special draw to Italian flavours.
Can you tell me a little about your culinary journey?
5 tips for a healthy gut
Nutritional Therapist and author of The Gut Makeover and The Gut Makeover Recipe Book, Jeannette Hyde, offers up some pointers on how to start eating for a healthy gut.
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Classes Ingredients
Mind the Gut: Q&A with Jeannette Hyde
Research has proven that having a healthy gut microbiome is critical to your overall health. Gut health doesn’t just keep weight and digestive symptoms down, mood and energy up; it is also linked to healthy skin and an improved immune system. Cookery School spoke to Jeannette Hyde, Nutritional Therapist and author of The Gut Makeover and The Gut Makeover Recipe Book, about how to eat for optimal gut – and mental – health.
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Classes Ingredients
To Ve(gan) Or Not To Ve(gan)
Veganism is one of Britain’s fastest growing lifestyle movements according to The Telegraph. November is officially ‘World Vegan Month’ so here’s a quick introduction to why people choose to be animal-free, according to The Vegan Society.
Animals – Vegans don’t eat any meat products and defend the lives of animals. This extends further than just food and includes cosmetics, clothing and even medicines.
Health – A lot of vegans believe that the health benefits of an animal-free diet include increased energy and younger looking skin!
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Classes Ingredients
