We just had a marvellous time as 6 girlfriends spent a morning learning about cake decorating, working with fondant and piping skills. The final results were just amazing.
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Come spend the day decorating your own gingerbread tree. We supply the baked and assembled tree, 24 gingerbread cookies, assorted candies and royal icing. Learn to pipe, colour flow and sugaring techniques.
Class is Saturday December 17, 2011 from 10 a.m. to 12 noon. Suitable for children 8 and over. Younger children may attend accompanied by an adult. Class is held at the Royal Canadian Curling Club, 131 Broadview Ave. Class is $35. Limited Spaces.
To register send an email to michelle@chefdemaison.ca
Can’t believe that it took me so long to make it up. With Christmas and Chanukah falling on the same week this year I thought that it was only fitting to create a decorate your own gingerbread menorah for all of those people who stare longingly at gingerbread houses.
Order this menorah fully decorated (with 8 candles waiting to be attached with royal icing) $45 or order this menorah as a kit, with all pieces, a piping bag of royal icing and then you get to go to your favourite bulk candy store and choose the candies of your dreams to decorate your menorah. $25.
Delivery not included. Order deadline is Friday November 25th.
Order yours now. Nibble on a fragrant gingerbread cookie every day from December 1st to 24th.
This tree stands over 16 inches tall.
$50. Pick up or local Toronto delivery available for a fee.
Our last day at camp saw the students prepare the day’s baking and meals on their own. As usual we started our morning with baking. The group collectively decided to make Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes.
After the cupcakes were baked, we sliced them in half and scooped out a wee hole in the centre for the filing.
This was a team effort
We drizzled the cupcakes with chocolate ganache
and here is the yummy result
Here is Emma getting the chicken prepped for the stir fry
together Tash and Kassidy chopped up all of the vegetables
Elizabeth gets working on prepping the vegetables for the Phad Thai
Vincent works on the tofu and the cooks the Phad Thai
Here is our lunch: Basmati Rice, Ginger Chicken Stir Fry and Phad Thai
After lunch we made irresistible treats. We collected leftover egg whites from the weeks’ work, whipped them up with some sugar and then got to use our piping skills again. Here we are making meringues.
Next we cooked up my favourite brown sugar fudge
We learned lots of candy making skills, especially about how different cooking temperatures affect the texture of sugar. Here we are making popcorn balls (our sugar went to 240F)
We finished our afternoon off with chocolate truffles. It takes a lot of chopping, fortunately everyone was a real pro by this time in the week
Just like the Swiss Master Chocolatiers we hand dip our centres.
And that’s it for camp for the summer. Shortly I’ll post our fall cooking lesson schedule for after school and evenings for both kids and adults.
No morning should start without some serious baking. Today, the class voted on chocolate brownie cupcakes with chocolate fudge icing.
We all took turns practising with the piping tube
A study in Chocolate Brownie Cupcake
Lunch today was a portable picnic lunch with Muffulletta, Sunny Sweet Potato Salad and Coleslaw with Spiced Parsley Mayonnaise. We grilled up the sausages from Meating on Queen. We tasted each one, we tried Chicken with Sun Dried Tomato, Turkey Sausage, Jerk Pork Sausage and Hot Ecuadorian Sausage. They were all fabulous and I highly recommend a visit to pick some up. 
Lots of grilled vegetables go inside our Mufulletta. Grilled Eggplant
some sliced tomatoes
some sauteed mushrooms
We chopped vegetables for coleslaw
We needed to peel potatoes for potato salad
After our veritable feast of a lunch we went Geocaching. Today we were searching for the Zhong Hua Men Archway Geocache It didn’t take too long to achieve success.
Then we headed into chinatown to do a Scavenger Hunt. The grocery store was air conditioned, it also had a very unusual array of items….frozen turtles?
Next was our afternoon baking session. We made Garlic Parmesan Monkey Bread
and Cinnamon Rolls
While we waited for the breads to bake we kept ourselves busy carving vegetables. We have some very very creative chefs!
Here is my new wallpaper 
We started our morning working with Filo pastry. We made our strudel filling together
We melted butter, brushed the filo sheets and then rolled them to make strudel and filo triangles.
Here is our finished work which we had with lunch. Grape and toasted pecan strudel. I hope that you got to try some if your son/daughter brought leftovers home.
We prepared the fish that we purchased at Hooked. The pickerel was breaded. Here we are with our breading station, flour, egg, breadcrumbs….always keep one hand clean.
We cooked up some rice, vegetables, soy sauce, ginger, garlic and make Whitefish en Papillote
Today was our vegetable preparation day. Elizabeth made honey lemon glazed carrots, Vincent made sauteed celeriac, grilled asparagus and grilled fennel. Emma made sauteed onions, Kassidy made some fabulous garlic sauteed mushrooms and Tash grilled us some summer squash. We had a nice selection for our buffet lunch.
We finally got to try the lemon squares that we made yesterday
After a full morning of cooking we went to the St Lawrence Market and did a Scavenger Hunt. We finished off our field trip with a Geocache. Today we found the Geocache named “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John”. We ended the day with more work on our vegetable flowers.
We cooked up a storm today but it remained surprisingly cool in the kitchen, especially in the walk in fridge….hey where are those kids.
We started off the morning by caramelizing sugar in preparation for creme caramel
We heated milk and cream and then tempered in some eggs for the custard in the creme caramel
On to salsa making. We scored at the Kensington Market yesterday and got some great fresh tomatillos…..so we made tomatillo salsa.
We loved the unique and sweet flavour of tomatillos.
We made 2 types of salsa (tomato and tomatillo) as well as guacamole to go with our corn tortilla chips
We had a veritable feast. Grilled fresh corn tortillas with refried beans, sauteed onions, sauteed peppers, chopped cilantro and cheese all grilled and then served with sour cream
Everyone wanted to sautee like a pro (without an implement to stir) so we all practiced flipping bread.
We’ll have it down pat by the end of the week for sure
our field trip took us to Meating On Queen. George showed us how how assembled, seasoned and mixed the sausage mixture. Today he was making Jerk Pork Sausages. We can’t wait to try them George. Thank you so much for sharing your trade secrets with us.
We stopped of at Hooked Fishmonger on Queen Street. They spent lots of time with us talking about the fisheries that they choose as suppliers. Visit them on Facebook to learn more. We picked up some whitefish and some pickerel that we’ll be cooking tomorrow. We also tried some Sea Asparagus, a first for me.
We ended our day with some baking and some vegetable carving.
We are back at work in the kitchen with some brand new, shining faces. We’re starting off with our mis en place for quiche making. First order of the day is onion chopping.
Quiches were the order for the day. Someone had to sautee all of the those onions. Thanks Kassidy.
We made Quiche Lorraine with Swiss Cheese
We made our dough and then everyone rolled out their own pastry
we crimped the edges
Some of us really got into our work and let it take over us….well at least take over our noses
Here’s a freshly baked quiche with a side salad.
For dessert we had fresh strawberries, rollie pollies and hand whipped cream
We made custard tarts later in the afternoon with the leftovers from our lunch!
It was a little hot and muggy outside but the baking inside was great!
Our last day in the kitchen together was a culminating one. Now that everyone has some solid culinary skills they were able to pair it with their good teamwork to execute lunch without any help from me.
Armed with their individual recipes they found their materials, did their mis en place and cooked their dish.
As became a camp tradition during, we baked off our morning snack first thing! Here are some peanut butter cookies
Then the chopping started.
We kept all of the trim from the vegetables that we chopped since Monday. We made some great vegetable stock from those vegetables and then we made an egg drop soup.
Everyone loved the soup
Here is our lunch plate. We had Phad Thai and Ginger Chicken served over basmati rice.
After lunch we went back to baking. We used a cookie press with spritz dough
We dipped our spritz cookies into coloured confectionary coating
Then we made chocolate truffles using traditional chocolatier technique. We made a chocolate ganached, piped mounds out onto parchment, assembled the mounds into balls and then dipped the centres into tempered chocolate. Yum. What a great end to our camp.
Thank you to Amirah, Bianca, Caroline, Hayley, Liam, Priya, Sierra and Sophie for learning and having fun with me in the kitchen. It was a great week and I hope that you enjoyed it.