We love supermum Terri-Anne Leske of Carrotsticks & Cravings, so couldn't resist her healthy cooking for kids class at the new Brettschneider's Baking and Cooking School. We review the class and share a nut-free jaffa energy balls recipe just perfect to pop in your little one’s lunch box!
Love kid-friendly bakery and cafe Baker & Cook and love making healthy, nutritious food for your child’s lunchbox? Us too. So we jumped at the chance to join a class with Terri-Anne Leske of Carrotsticks & Cravings fame and make healthy snacks for kids at the brand new Brettschneider’s Baking & Cooking school. While we’re fans of sending our lovely helpers to cooking courses, and our kids to fun cooking classes in Singapore, this is one course you’ll want to keep for yourself. Have you seen the @carrotsticksandcravings Instagram feed? Divine. We discovered that creating healthy snacks for kids can be super easy with the help of a seasoned pro and mum like Terri-Anne, and she has kindly let us share with you her lunchbox friendly nut-free jaffa energy ball recipe.
Check out our review of her workshop below… If any of the many other Brettschneider classes on offer are anywhere near as fab as this one, we’re signing up. Stat.
The moment we breezed into the inviting, light and airy space we knew we were in for an incredible culinary experience. The state-of-the-art kitchen with sleek marble bench tops and top-line equipment (think Scanpan, Kenwood and Global knives) stirred inspiration, and the barista-brewed coffee that appeared moments later only heightened the buzz of excitement in the room. Enter Terri-Anne Leske: a passionate foodie, an at once stylish yet down-to-earth mum of three kids, and one of the loveliest women you’re likely to meet.
We hopped straight on the tools, with four health-boosting recipes to whip up, and only four hours to do it! On the menu that day: nut-free granola bars, nut-free jaffa energy balls, homemade wraps and fresh lemon chicken salad wrap filling. Mouthwatering…
Terri-Anne’s ethos is to use foods that are as unprocessed and natural as possible as they taste better and are much better for you. We agree. It’s often a case of swapping out the bad for the good – like refined sugar for raw honey, or butter for coconut oil (and using bananas to bind granola bars). All her recipes are jam-packed with healthy and environmentally sound ingredients like kale, spinach, seeds, avocado and coconut oils and cacao powder. That’s not to say chocolate is not allowed – just use good-quality organic chocolate with a high cocoa percentage (the darker the better!) and drizzle instead of dunk. It’s important to Terri-Anne when creating her recipes to use products that can be sourced easily at Cold Storage or Redmart (although she also sources them herself from iherb and Singapore-based online organic retailer Foodsterr).
What we loved about this class is that all of the recipes are super quick and easy. Perfect for cooks of any level, and great for little kiddie hands too! You’d think the kale in the homemade wraps would be a definite no-go for fussy eaters, but no! The green super-food is blitzed up with water as the liquid for the dough, so the kids will never notice (ours gobbled them up after school and asked for more)! The energy balls are bake-free, and it’s therapeutic rolling them in shredded coconut at the end! Everything we made was freezer friendly, so you can cook up a big batch and freeze in snack-sized portions to pull out as needed. We love time saving hacks.
Plating up the fruits of our labour and enjoying a lunch, chat and NZ sauv blanc was the perfect ending to an exquisite morning. It felt so rewarding knowing that every morsel on our plate we had made ourselves from scratch. The joy of cooking! And best of all: you take home what you have made to test out on the kids before forking out to buy ingredients. The verdict? Everything we cooked scored massive thumbs up from our discerning kid crew.
NUT-FREE JAFFA ENERGY BALLS:
Right, it’s time to check the Brettschneider’s Baking & Cooking School schedule. We’re continuing our culinary education with the bread-making course, run by the man Dean Brettschneider himself…
Brettschneider’s Baking & Cooking School is located at #1 Greendale Ave, 289495 Singapore (just behind the Baker & Cook flagship bakery); check the website for class schedules www.bakingandcookingschool.com.