The Splat Cooking Blog

We ran our first Edible Christmas Pressie workshop last week for grown ups so after that and running Christmas workshops at Blenheim Palace we’re all feeling very Christmassy – even bought a tin of Quality Street for the office so that’s it, Christmas really has arrived.

After the workshop we had loads of icing and biscuits left over so when my children came in from school instead of putting TV on (yes, I am ashamed to admit it, but that’s what they do!) they went straight into the kitchen and spent the next 2 hours icing biscuits and here’s the photo of the result.

These were iced in royal icing using piping bags and done by children aged 4, 7 and 10 – pretty good, even I do say so myself, but they do get a lot of practice.

It’s not rocket science, it’s just food and it’s fun. Beats watching TV.

For those of you that missed the program last night, here’s an extract of Bev’s interview:

First step in achieving celebrity chef status (well, I can dream, can’t I) – went into London today to the Capital Studios for an interview with Stefan Gates on Food Uncut. I have been milking this a bit, well, a lot really, this week at the office and they’ve all had a good laugh at my expense, but do I care, no way, I had my own dressing room today and bumped in to Sophie Grigson in make up.

Anyway, it was great fun and the crew were all really lovely. On the way into London I managed to get the same train as an really old (not that we’re old, we’ve just known each other a long time) friend Lotte Duncan, who is truly a celebrity chef and has done so much cooking on TV she’ll be a National Treasure shortly. Lotte’s just set up her own cookery school in between TV appearances so you should have a look at her website on http://www.lotteduncan.com.

So if you want to see me on TV talking about Splat and how it all came about and showing off some of our great products you’ll need to watch Food Uncut on Thursday 9 November at 1.30pm.

Alison and I have spent the last two mornings in Stoke Mandeville Combined School in Aylesbury running workshops with the children. This week is their History Week and each year has chosen a country to study. One aspect they wanted to cover was the food of each country.

With no cooking facilities we agreed that the best way forward would be for us to prepare a dish for each particular country which we would take in for the children to try along with suitable ingredients to try as well. Where possible we encouraged the children to make dishes up, adding ingredients, mixing and stirring, dipping and rolling and in one year group getting covered in chocolate icing – fantastic.

Alison and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, beat being in the office big time. Especially when we had a child who would not eat vegetables who tried a carrot after much persuasion from his friends and discovered he liked them and another child who was well know never to try anything different who eventually did try the hummus, he didn’t like it but he tried it – wow!

We had Year 6 today who were doing South America this week, we started the workshop tallking about chocolate and much to our delight not one of the children when asked where chocolate came from said ‘a factory in Birmingham’ – Fabulous.

We even had one of the Mums call the office this afternoon to say how much her son had enjoyed the session yesterday when we had done Samosas.

Wonderful children, fantastic school.