This is a detailed blog post dedicated to our experience in a 3hr cooking class at Food Playground on Dec 29th 2017. We paid full price to take part in this and it is not a sponsored post. The photos have been adjusted by me to obscure B’s face as per his request when I blog 🙂
This was our first ever cooking class!
Food Playground was recommended to us by friends from Canberra who had tried it, but it also comes up as the top search result on Trip Advisor and most google searches for cooking classes in Singapore. The booking process was very easy ($99 each, all done online and paid with PayPal a few months ago) and as well as immediate confirmation of payment, we also received an emailed reminder in the 24hrs leading up to the class.
I have a shellfish allergy which I mentioned on the original booking and reminded them about via email a week before. Not only were they great with it on the day but Daniel (the owner) emailed me back – on Christmas no less – and made sure that my cooking partner would be happy to miss out the fishy side of things in our dish. Mr B appreciated being asked although he’s used to me taking that choice away for him lol.
Our trip to the cooking class venue was an easy one, we hopped one MRT stop to Chinatown and then walked about 7 mins. In total, it took about 19mins and cost 0.77c each from Fort Canning. I had read quite a lot about this cooking class beforehand and noted that one of the (very few) less positive reviews mentioned the venue lacked character. I didn’t feel this way at all! It’s smack bang in Chinatown and surrounded by all the local sights and smells.
The class started at 9:30am on the dot and we commenced with introducing ourselves and then playing a guessing game that led into discussion around some of the different authentic dishes in Singapore and their heritage. It was also made very clear at this time that we would have lots of photos taken of us and they would be emailed out after. Obviously B just sighed (he’s an anti social media man) but I thought it was a great idea and it meant I focused a lot more on the experience as the memory capturing was being done for me. I have, as always, obscured B’s face in all photos on this blog at his request.
We learnt about the dishes we were going to cook for this lesson – laksa, spring rolls and hoon kueh. Our class was on a Friday but they do a different “menu” each day. We started with dessert (corn hoon kueh) and folding the tiny baskets made out of leaves. We then created the jelly mix with mung bean flour, coconut milk and sugar + some corn kernels. Filling the little parcels was tricky as the jelly set so quickly!
After dessert went into the fridge to set, we made the mix for the spring rolls as a group. While working on this part we learnt about some of the differences between vegetables. For example, these spring rolls had local turnip in them which is a brown root vegetable that’s similar in consistency (and sweetness) to a pear – that’s definitely not what a turnip in Australia is like!
Then, we started on the laksa. I had a special veg version because of my shellfish allergy and we all made laksa paste FROM SCRATCH. It was hard work on my poor little arms. While I worked on pounding the paste, B was in charge of chopping ingredients for the paste (chilli, lemongrass, shallot, blue ginger) and also wrapped our spring rolls ready for cooking.
We then used our laksa paste to create an amazing laksa sauce. Ours had water instead of prawn stock and B said the prawn stock one tasted much more savoury – I still thought mine was good though. When we served everything up, B even got to put a prawn on his at the end so he didn’t entirely miss the shellfish part 🙂
We then all sat down to eat our efforts! We were the only people who ate everything and didn’t leave with a take out container – is that really a surprise though?
Finally….as some of you may know, my day job is working with young people who have experienced significant trauma and are disengaged from education. As a result of this, the social values and mission of this company really spoke to me. They aim to provide flexible working conditions that enable stay at home mums and senior women to re-enter the workforce. Wonderful!!
All in all, it was a 10/10 experience from me and I would certainly do this again on a future trip to Singapore.
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