International Cooking Club | Drapers Mills Primary Academy

International Cooking Club

Pasta Day

Today we left it all in children's hands. We opened the cupboard and ask them to cook something from the ingredients we had. They had to find the tools, prepare, cook and tidy up themselves. They did brilliantly and prepared four types of pasta with tomato sauce and cheese.

Triffle

Another super popular dessert that we just had to make again !!😉

Banofee Pie

This lovely British dessert has been so popular with all of our cooking club groups that we decided to make it again.

Yummy and Healthy

We are making smoothies!!!!

Healthy stuff with a pinch of naughtiness :P

We decided to be healthy this time and made mini fruit kebabs using many different fruits. We couldn't help ourselves though and used some melted chocolate (white and milk) and whipped cream as dips :)

CRISPY CAKES

We made this quick ,easy and delicious dessert using corn flakes and crispy rice. We covered them in a milk and white chocolate :)

Pavlova

This week we have learned how to make PAVLOVA- one of the most popular English desserts. We used ready made meringues, whipped fresh cream and fruits- fresh and tinned ones.

Banofee pie

Children loved making banofee pies. They tasted great! We believe that parents also liked them as we had a few nice comments :-)

TRIFLE

We made our trifles out of the sponge cake, jelly, tinned fruits and custard. Can you guess in what order we did it? Which layer goes first?

Chinese New Year

Chicken & noodle soup and stir fry

How many different ways to cook eggs?

This week our little chefs have investigated eggs!

Eggs are awesome! They are cheap, packed with proteins and healthy fats and easy to cook.

Pasta week

We investigated pastas of all shapes, dry and fresh, raw and cooked!

Pastas are very versatile and form the base of simple but nutritious meals.

We learnt how to cook pastas by adding some salt and oil to water. When the water started to simmer we added the pastas and carefully timed the cooking, some took a bit longer than others to cook.

We tasted each variety, penne, wholewheat fusilli, lasagna sheets, spaghettis and compared their texture. We added tomato sauce and grated cheese to our feast. Delicioso!

Christmas Fair 15.12.15

1/12/2015

This Tuesday we visited Poland and made something that my mum used to cook when I was a little girl. I absolutely love them. You can eat, eat and eat them and you don't realise when they're all gone:)

I'm talking about faworki, chrusty or chrusciki. Apparently in US they called Angel Wings and in Italy- chiacchiere.

Chrusty (plural) mean dry branches broken off trees .Anyway, it’s only the name. They are simple. It is a deep-fried dough sprinkled with icing sugar, nothing else. But they are very, very good.

I have made the pastry at home because we wouldn't have enough time to make it at school, but everything else was made by children:))

That's how we did it!

Here is the recipe:

500 g plain flour
4-5 yolks
2 Tbsp vinegar (I substituted with rum)
pinch of salt
200 g sour cream
3 packets of Frytex or different shortening deep-fry (you can use it also oil or lard)
icing sugar for sprinkling

Place all ingredients into a bowl. Knead a dough. You can use a mixer.

It takes quite a long time. You will know that the dough is ready when it will be smooth and elastic.

If it is too dry add extra one or two tablespoons of the sour cream.

And now the fun part. Put the dough on the counter and start beating it with a rolling pin. If you beat it well, you will get more air bubbles and your chrusty will be lighter and better.

Cover the dough with a kitchen towel and leave it in a fridge for an hour.

Split the dough into a few smaller parts and roll it very thin. If you have a pasta roller, use it.

The thiner the better. Mine were still to thick.

Cut the rolled dough into rectangles 6-cm long and 4-cm wide (they should be longer than wider and shouldn’t be bigger than a pot you are frying them in).

Cut a slit in the middle of every rectangle.

And pull one end through the slit.

Heat Frytex or oil in a big pot or saucepan to 175°C. Use enough oil that chrusty can float freely.

Fry chrusty around 1 minutes on every side (or until golden). Don’t overcrowd the pan, as the oil temperature will drop down. Flip them using wooden skewers.

Take them out of the oil and put it on a plate covered with paper towel to absorb extra oil.

Sprinkle chrusty with the icing sugar.

Smacznego :)

24.11.15

This week the children enjoyed baking Alsatian Christmas cookies, butter bredeles. I used to make those with my grandmother before Christmas and still love to do so with my daughter now.

To make around 50 biscuits you will need:

250g flour
125g butter
250g caster sugar
5 egg yolks
some milk to brush the biscuits

Alsatian bredeles

Butter Bredele

Watch some French children bake some butter bredeles in the video below:

Bredeles are small biscuits or cakes traditionally baked in Alsace, France, during the Christmas period.

20.10.15- French bakery-Croissants

A bit of history first: Croissants are a French viennoiserie made of a layered flaky pastry, similar to puff pastry. They can be made plain or with nuts or other fillings.

In 1838 an Austrian artillery officer founded his own Viennese boulangerie in Paris which became very popular for its croissants!

So we made croissants...and took short cuts because we did not have enough time to make our own pastry, but our croissants tasted delicious nevertheless

10.10.15- Italian cuisine

This week our little chefs made healthy mini pizzas using muffin for the bases and a selection of cooked meats, vegetables and cheese for the toppings.