You have watched the videos. Forty of them, probably, and there is a piping set in a drawer that has been out of its box twice. What a video cannot give you is not information. It is someone standing at your elbow saying colder, or stop, that is enough.
That is the whole design of our classes. Four people. One bench, in a working patisserie inside The Welder on Welles Street, with Chef Dhi standing in it rather than in front of it. So the question is not whether a class is worth doing. It is which one you should book, and that depends almost entirely on what is currently going wrong.
Four seats, and why that number decides everything
Most decorating classes are demonstrations with an audience. This is not one, because four is the maximum the bench holds. You get corrected while your hands are still moving, which is the only moment a correction is any use at all. Four also means that booking two of the seats makes you and whoever you bring half the room, so the day goes to someone you like rather than three strangers, and two cakes come home instead of one. Couples, mothers and daughters, and pairs of friends are most of what we take, and the classes are better for it.
If you have never really baked
Start at Cake Decorating Level 1. It runs over two days and you build a 15cm sponge cake from nothing: sponge, Swiss meringue, vanilla custard and fruit jam all made from scratch, then assembled the way a patisserie assembles one. Nothing arrives in a packet, which is the point of doing it here rather than at home.
If your cakes taste good and look homemade
That is a buttercream problem, not a baking one, and it is the most common thing people walk in with. Level 2 is two days on a 15cm two-layer vanilla cake: vanilla layers, a tres leches soak, smooth buttercream and the chocolate drip. Level 3 is two days on a 15cm four-layer chocolate cake, with proper ganache, caramel mousse, and the piping that separates a cake somebody made from a cake somebody baked. The numbers describe the cake, not a prerequisite. All three are genuinely suitable for beginners, so if chocolate is what you actually want, skip the ladder and take Level 3 first.
If the material matters more than the cake
Some people are not really after a cake at all. If it is chocolate, the chocolate class spends two days on tempering, polycarbonate moulds, ganache and truffle fillings, and shelling and capping bonbons. Tempering changes how you look at every chocolate bar you have ever bought, and the background to that sits in where the snap and shine come from.
If it is French pastry more broadly, the one-day choux pastry class returns more per day than anything else on the list, because éclairs, profiteroles, croquembouche and the Paris–Brest are all the same dough, a dough that rises on steam alone. And the one-day tarts class is the one to take if your bases shrink, slump or go soggy: lining, blind baking, refined fillings, and balancing flavour against texture.
If it is a group rather than a lesson
A class caps at four and asks you to concentrate. If there are eight of you and nobody wants homework, book the Mini-Cake Decorating Challenge instead. Everyone gets a freshly baked mini cake, a palette of buttercream and the same garnishes the kitchen uses, then ninety minutes to beat each other. It runs for four to twelve guests, Tuesday to Friday between 11am and 4pm, and it is a party rather than a workshop. Longer team-building formats run in one, two and three-hour versions, and they are set out in four ways to book us for a group.
Booking, dietary notes and hours
Dates sit on the upcoming classes page, with the full programme on the classes page and each class carrying its own current price. They start at $130 for a one-day workshop, and the two-day ones sit above that. With only four seats, the available date decides the booking more often than the class does, so look at dates first.
For the decorating challenge we can provide brownie substitutes made with no added gluten. Please note that our kitchen is small and without exclusive production areas for all of our different recipes, so traces may occur, and nothing we make can be guaranteed safe for anyone with severe coeliac disease.
If you are ordering from the menu rather than booking a seat, the date picker at checkout only shows dates the kitchen can meet: two days for most things, three for larger desserts, seven for petit fours. Collection is in person from Welles Street. We do not deliver or courier, because desserts of this kind do not survive a drive across town intact. We are open 10am to 6pm Tuesday to Friday and 10am to 3pm on Saturday, and closed Sunday and Monday.
