Attended my very first baking workshop at Creative Culinaire, which I signed up on impulse some time last month.

I arrived at the school 20 mins prior to the start time and was pleasantly surprised to find out that they provided drinks and slices of cafe's signature cake for us. We were advised to come at 8.50am to allow some time to settle down before the class started at 9am. But the class started a little late, they said there were 3 courses running concurrently and they did look overwhelmed - not all the logistics were ready and we had to wait every now and then for them to fetch this and that.

3 recipes were tried out: christmas logcake, chocolate rochers and tea truffles. The logcake was actually cream covered swiss roll with ganache filling, the only one that required baking. For all of the recipes, we watched the chef demonstrated how the ingredients were prepared. After that she would distribute the almost-final products to us to finish up.

Tea Truffles

For tea truffles we filled in chocolate shells with ganache filling using piping bags and then decorated them. For rochers we mixed the melted chocolate with nuts and rice puffs, scooped them into baking paper and let them set. Log cake was the most challenging: we put in the ganache filling, rolled it up, set it on a cardboard, smeared it with cream and decorated it.

Chocolate Rochers with Almond Nut

I was actually expecting a more hands-on session in which I could try all the steps, instead of only finishing up the almost-final products. But for that I guess I need to sign up for proper baking classes, definitely not to be done on impulse :p

Christmas Logcake

We got another pleasant surprise at the end of the workshop (that stretched to 4 hours from the scheduled 3 hours) - our group was selected as happiest, friendliest group from the way we worked together. We were given $10 voucher which we used right away at the cafe. I picked this cranberry cheesecake slice. Oh, our group name was 8 stable hands.. ;)

Cranberry Cheesecake