Raisingkids.co.uk's Editor, Catherine Hanly, checks out a cookery course aimed at introducing parents and children to the joys of cooking and baking.

It’s 9.30 in the morning and I’m with five other women in a stranger’s kitchen, gazing at some iced biscuits. The biscuits in question have been beautifully decorated with glittery fondant icing and look like the work of a seasoned professional. ‘That was someone in my last class,’ smiles our teacher, Beverley Glock, ‘and she’d never done a bit of icing before she came here!’ By lunchtime, she’s expecting the motley crew she has in front of her to do the same.

Beverley launched Splat Cooking in 2001 when her search for someone to run a cooking party for her daughter’s fifth birthday proved fruitless. Since then she’s become something of a one woman mission in the Home Counties, enthusing countless children with the joys of cooking. It’s become something of a mini empire – there’s the website which sells every conceivable kind of child’s cookery kit, baking ingredients, and cookie cutters. She also offers a birthday party service, and school workshops, not to mention days like this when grown-ups can learn a thing or two about the joys of icing.

‘Everything you do today, is exactly the same as the children do in their workshops,’ says Beverley. If anything, I’m worried that the children probably do a whole lot better than myself – baking isn’t really my strong suit, and I’ve never iced a thing in my life. Happily, Beverley and her colleague Alison, are great teachers, and within minutes we’re stuck into a recipe for ginger truffles which seems really easy to make, but which look incredibly impressive – just the thing for impressing my daughter’s teachers with this Christmas!

‘Children just love cooking,’ Beverley tells me. ‘They’re so eager to learn. I have the 4 to 8 year olds using the cookie cutters to cut out coloured shapes to ice the biscuits, and once they’re eight they’re able to use the piping bags.

It’s the piping bags that really put the wind up a roomful of generally confident women. ‘Here are some we made earlier,’ chirps the irrepressible Beverley, as she shows us how to use the piping bags to outline our designs and then fill them in. It’s not unlike being a contestant on The Generation Game, I’m thinking, but a lot more fun.

Eventually, three hours later we have an armful of fantastic looking truffles, cakes and iced biscuits to take home with us (yes, the images you see on this page were actually iced by me!), and Beverley already has a number of bookings from mums eager to sign up their children for a Splat Cooking lesson. It’s easy to see how Beverley’s calm teaching methods and fun ideas could get any child enthusiastic about food and cooking.

Splat Cooking workshops start with children as young as 5. For more information go to www.splatcooking.co.uk

• Click here for more tips on getting your children interested in cooking.
  
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