Cooking Club – January

Briefly the aims of the club go beyond cooking! Yes, we teach girls to cook, but we also aim to teach girls to be confident and enjoy being in the kitchen and making different foods. Cooking Club is a place where girls learn to have fun, to enjoy being in the kitchen and to enjoy making food. It is a social and educational experience, providing opportunities for girls to make friends, to work in groups with many different kinds of people while learning cook.

In the first lesson of the term we made ice cream. Ice cream is a simple enough dish. Consequently girls had completed all that there was to do after about 45 minutes after starting (including cleaning up and getting to know Ms Witthuhn and me). The girls were allowed to experiment with different flavourings – cherry and almonds, vanilla, peppermint crisp and Oreo. All thoroughly enjoyed it – which I am very happy about as this was our first lesson! First lessons should always be easy and yet fun so that the girls relax into being part of Cooking Club. We had many new faces from the Grade 8′s and a few familiar ones from Grade 9′s. I’m glad to say that the familiar faces helped the new faces quite a bit in everything! There was also new equipment that Ms W entrusted us with – quite an interesting learning experience for me too!

One of the most important lessons was really knocked into one group of girls when they put way too much almond essence into their ice cream – NEVER EVER USE MORE THAN 1 TEASPOON OF ALMOND ESSENCE! I had to learn it the hard way too! Almond essence is probably the strongest essence there is! If you put too much in it – whoops… all you are going to taste is almond essence (which surprisingly tastes very bitter and makes you sick if you eat too much of it)

But all in all the girls really enjoyed their first lesson for the term.

The second lesson was slightly harder than just whipping up cream and adding condensed milk (how to make Ice Cream!) although this recipe was also easier than most and a lot quicker than all chocolate mousse recipes I have come across.  It still involves boiling milk! However we were completely confident that Wynberg girls can do anything.

We were correct:  the girls pulled off a stunningly delicious chocolate mousse that had everyone at break salivating! As the mousse had to set over night – the girls came to collect it the next day, during break on Friday.