Teen Chefs at The Maya Kitchen Day 2

The Maya Kitchen is offering culinary lessons for kids and teens this summer aside from its regular lessons. Please visit The Maya Kitchen to know more about the other schedules and offerings. 

The second day of the Teens Culinary Workshop was a bit more relaxed compared with Day 1 since the teens have gotten to know more each other and has more rapport than the previous day when some still tend to be shy. They're also much more confident of their cooking skills and in handling kitchen utensils this time. 

words by Kristin Kei 

My favorite part in the culinary teen workshop was Day 2. We started with the pretzels. Earlier on that day we watched a video about pretzels and how it was done in factories. It’s kinda challenging because we’ll be doing it on our own. But it’s not that much because we do it by group and we divide the tasks as equally as possible. Mixing ingredients is so fun yet tiring and I learned that whenever you mix, all the movement must come from your wrist and not from your arms. We turned the dough out onto a floured surface. Knead the dough for a few minutes and shape into a ball, and shape it into a pretzel.

While it was being baked in the oven, we started combining the ingredients for the sponge cake that will be used for our Berry-Mango trifle! Yay! We made two mixtures for this recipe; one was the pastry cream which was keep chilled in the refrigerator, and the other was for the sponge cake which was baked for about 20-25 minutes.

Moving on, we started making fries as our side dish by simply cutting the potatoes. Half was baked and the other half was fried (just for some kind of experiment but for me the fried ones will always be better).  We got a tip from Chef Sab on how to make fries crispy – precook the fries and cook it again before it’s served with high oil temperature. While working on the fries, my other groupmates started with fish fillet which was pretty much easy. To make the batter, we sift salt, baking powder and salt. Before the fish gets fried, all you have to do was to dip it in the batter.. then tadaah! Serve them hot with lemon wedges.

Time for desserts! Each of us assembled our very own trifle. We divided the sponge cake and sliced it into squares.  In layering the trifle in the glass, we first put the pastry cream, then the sponge cake, pastry cream again.. and whatever we want to add. Since I’m not that into berries and so are my groupmates, we used mangoes!

I added chantilly cream  with blueberry and a cherry on top!

And the most awaited part for the session was the eating time! Not being so biased but everything just tasted so good. It’s one of the best feelings because after all the hardwork, everything turned out well.