Culinary Skills club is a great after school opportunity for your children! Culinary skills club normally lasts throughout the whole year every Wednesday afternoon from 4pm to 5:15pm we bring the needed ingredients and we meet up at the cooking suite with the guidance from Ms Allen, we cook or bake, sweet or savoury, a dish of the group’s choice (These can also be halal or changed for any allergies) You can either do it with a partner or by yourself. We all enjoy practising and fine tuning our baking skills in this amazing opportunity for the boys at QEGS. This week we will be making brownies which is very exciting because Ms Allen always finds great recipes for us to use and I think that the brownies we all make are nice. As well as making food like brownies we also enjoy making savoury food that will be an important life skill in the future. In particular earlier this year we learnt how to make a spectacular tomato sauce to go with pasta. This will be extra important because we learnt how to make it quickly, easily and effectively under the guidance of Mrs Allen. I remember last year we made a risotto. This helped us to fine tune our patience and our skill at working out when food is ready and cooked or not. I remember thinking a lot about how much water specifically to put in and also working out when the rice is ready to eat. This club is great fun for all ages and we all look forward to it throughout the week. Our favourite part of the club is interacting with others during the club and getting to try out new recipes and dishes (Especially the Crème Brûlées)  , as well as bringing home the food to eat later. As well as all of this we are also safely taught how to use a range of technical and potentially dangerous items safely. We have been taught how to use the ovens, hobs and knives responsibly, and how to make sure we stay safe around boiling water and making sure we don’t burn ourselves on hot baking trays.  The skills we have developed and learned include kneading dough effectively while keeping the air in making sure that the bread is very light and fluffy on the inside. Another skill we have developed is the cleaning up and washing up to finish. After baking we have a lot of dirty bowls and equipment so we have to practice cleaning our work surfaces and putting everything away before we can leave. 

Rowan Tivers and Oscar Rawden