Master Chef (sort of)

Our tax team decided to do another activity together and the verdict this time was to go to baking school. I know what you are thinking, what a joke! We all know I don’t bake, but I figured if I had an instructor I really couldn’t mess it up.

When I found out we were going to be baking some bread as part of our course, I made everyone laugh when I asked if we were supposed to make the bread from scratch. I’ve never done that before.

So the other night we headed on over to Strawberry Fare Baking School, which is a baking school associated with a very popular dessert restaurant here in Christchurch.

Luckily we weren’t doing one of these 5 hour courses – they offer an evening course for groups where you get some dinner in addition to learning how to make a couple of desserts. We started off with some drinks until we got started. I got paired up with Caitlin, a new graduate who started with PwC about 8 months ago. She is an expert baker, so I was in good hands.

The first item up was making some ciabatta bread. I was excited because this is such a yummy type of bread.

My friend Quynh Tran and her fiance Andy

Waiting for our dough to mix. Notice I picked the pink Kitchen Aid?

My cooking buddy Caitlin Gray is making sure our bread dough is getting thoroughly mixed

All ready to let the dough rise!

Once the bread dough was made, we set it aside to raise for a bit. Then it was on to our first dessert: Crème Brulee. I was a little bit nervous about this one because it seems intense and I can’t make pudding anyway. But our instructor was awesome and Caitlin kept me on the right track. I forgot to take pictures of the prep, but I will have some later on.

After getting the crème brulee going, we also made a gluten free chocolate raspberry cake. We used some amazingly yummy Belgian dark chocolate that we kept sneaking while we mixed everything together. Once the batter was mixed, we used these really cute triangle tins to make the mini cakes in. These are something I would actually like to use in the future (with a cake mix of course).

We added some frozen raspberries to the cake and it's ready to go in the oven

While the cakes were baking, we began finishing our creme brulees. First, we added a thin layer of sugar over the top of the pudding.

Our instructor is on the left and my colleagues Laura Cotter and Jason Page are adding sugar to the creme brulee

Here's mine before taking a torch to it!

Now for the fun part. We got to use little torches to carmelize the sugar to give it that crispy top. It was pretty fun!

This was basically the end of our instruction. We got to add some little drizzles to the make our desserts look beautiful and then it was time to eat some dinner. Just in time because we were starving at this point!

Not too shabby if I do say so myself :)

Verdict: super yummy

Our bread was done by the end of dinner, so we got to take that home with us as well as the extra mini cakes. It was actually a really fun night. The cake wasn't too bad, but I probably wouldn't attempt to make a creme brulee again - too much time and effort for how much you get out of it in the end. I'd much rather by it at a restaurant!

Brian and I enjoyed my ciabatta bread later and it was soooo good!