Ready, steady, cook at Culinary On; our latest team bonding night saw us take on the challenge of whipping up a restaurant-worthy Italian feast. Here’s how we got on at cookery school!
It ain’t all hard work here at Honeycombers HQ, we’re partial to frolicking in treetops, getting pampered within an inch of our lives at Singapore’s top spas, and we can regularly be found testing out the hottest ladies nights in town. But for our latest team bonding sesh, we wanted to do something that combined two of our greatest passions: food and wine. So when we stumbled across Culinary On, it felt as though we’d hit the jackpot. A cooking class with free-flow wine? This was unchartered Honeycombers territory we couldn’t wait to explore. Ready, steady… cook!
Firstly, this is a foodie masterclass like no other. Culinary On pride themselves on being an ‘edutainment’ cookery school; yes, you’ll learn how to whip up a mean feast, but you’ll also have a helluva lot of fun while doing so. Located in the heart of the CBD at One Raffles Place, Culinary On takes over a whopping 7000sq ft of culinary entertainment space. It’s huge, and our group of 25 felt more than comfortable. As we arrived we donned our chefs whites, had a glass of vino thrust in our paws, and were encouraged to nibble on professionally prepared canapes. This is our kinda cooking class.
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We opted for an Italian themed menu (though you can plump for others, Culinary On offer 12 world cuisines and 49 different set menus to choose from) and the professional chef in charge of proceedings was a bona fide, authentic, larger than life, Italian. Heck, he was even called Giuseppe! Our mission? To recreate a beautiful prawn, tomato, and basil tagliatelle from scratch (even the pasta!), followed by a chocolate fondant. This was a feast an Italian nonna would be proud of, how the hell were us Honeycombers going to pull it off?! Giuseppe certainly had his work cut out (though given he was a judge on the Russian MasterChef Junior 2015, if anyone could turn a bunch of amateurs into pasta making prodigies, it’s him).
We began by whipping up the mixture for our chocolate fondant; you know, that practically impossible dessert to make with the oozing centre of chocolate lava? Turns out, creating the mixture is easier than it looks. Thanks to Giuseppe’s expert advice, even us amateurs had our fondants prepped and in the oven within ten minutes! Our next task was creating pasta dough. From scratch. Amazingly, this too was a task we totally nailed (if we do say so ourselves, and despite the fact we’d quaffed numerous glasses of vino by this point!).
Messy tasks complete, we retreated to the large kitchen area where Giuseppe, accompanied by some glamourous Honeycomber assistants, pulled together all of the prepped ingredients to create 30 bowls of beautiful, steaming prawn tagliatelle. Quite miraculously, it tasted incredible! Bellies almost full, we awaited the arrival of the chocolate fondants for dessert. Against all odds, these too turned out perfectly. Quite how we’d managed to pull this off, well – your guess is as good as ours.
The verdict? Culinary On is a total hit; great food, great wine, and a whole heap of foodie fun. Excellent team bonding adventure? You bet’cha!
This article is sponsored by Culinary On