Eric Lanlard’s Baked Vanilla Cheesecake

This cheesecake recipe calls for 900g of (full fat) cream cheese. So when I was out picking up the ingredients the supermarket only sold them in 200g tubs, so off I went to pick up five.

That's...a lot of cheese.

French cooking class at L'atelier des Chefs

"What do they wax lemons with, chef?"

"Er...wax?"

This was the question I asked the chef at our cooking class this week. In an effort to seem keen and interested (which I was!) I had asked a Stupid Question.

One of the other guys there, bless him, did try and help me out "Don't worry! We were all thinking it". But its ok, I had already died of embarrassment at this point.

So where was I asking this question, you ask?

A group of us found these excellent Groupon deals for a place called L'atelier Des Chefs near Bond Street, which run a bunch of different cooking and baking classes ranging from Japanese to Moroccan to French and Italian.

What did we think of it? And how was the food? I can only say is that I came home with a very content belly full of French delicacies after a great evening chatting with good friends and meeting new people.

To start off, we all put our aprons on and moved into the kitchen, where our expert chef (she used to work in fine dining all over the world) told us how to properly prepare the ingredients we were using.

In our French class, we cooked (see pictures below!)

Crisp confit duck leg with salad paysanne and fried quail's egg

Roasted fillet of pollock with samphire, shellfish velouté and girolle mushrooms

Creme brulee with mini madeleines