In the spirit of Christmas, I held a festive baking demo session over the weekend at a community centre.
What was originally supposed to be a group of 25 grew into a group of 30 which saw the cosy kitchen room packed to the brim with chairs. It’s a good thing i was given advanced notice on the numbers attending so there was just enough cookies and cupcakes to go round.
As there wasn’t enough time to bake the Christmas treats during the class itself, i baked the cupcakes, cookies and log cake as well as made the cupcake frosting and glace icing for the cookies beforehand. The idea was that i show them how to make the cake batters and cookie dough, what the baked goods would look like, have them play around with the decorating of the unadorned cupcakes and cookies for a bit of hands on and shape, frost and decorate the log cake on the spot.
I had so much fun! The class were really interested in what i was doing and kept really lighthearted with jokes and teasing dished out by the few men who were grossly outnumbered by the ladies.
People came up to frost and decorate the cupcakes and cookies, asked loads of questions and were really impressed by the log cake. I, in turn, was really impressed by some of the artistic designs that showed up on the cookies- not a easy feat given that they were only given plastic spoons and skewers to work with! I loved sharing tips like how to get any traces of egg yolks out from a sea of whites, getting the glace icing to set quicker as well as answering questions they had. It made me feel like such a culinary expert, if only for the day 
I would like to say a huge thank you to KC and Rosemary for making the class possible and organizing everything- KC especially for running down to the canteen midway through class to re-melt a bowl of melted chocolate that hardened from sitting out too long in the airconditioned room- some of the really sweet ladies who did everything from helping me with the washing up between the recipes, moving stuff around so i had more space to work and cleaning up after me, despite my protests and all who attended the class- thank you for making it such a wonderful experience, i really enjoyed the class. Oh and of course, a big thank you to my two darling friends who spent the night at my place a couple nights before the class who helped with the cutting out of the Christmas cookies and provided lots of laugh and gossip as well as aunty Karen who took most of the photos you see here- thank you.
Now that the class is over and done with, i’ve got a couple more milestones coming up in the new year- starting that job and running the SunDown 10km marathon!
