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. A voice at your elbow saying colder, or stop, that is enough.
Our classes are built around exactly that. Four people. One bench, in a working patisserie inside The Welder on Welles Street, with Chef Dhi standing in it and not in front of it. So the question is not whether a class is worth doing. The question is which one, 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. Ours is not, because four is the maximum the bench holds. You get corrected while your hands are still moving, and that is the only moment a correction is any use at all. Book two of the four seats and you and whoever you bring are half the room. The day goes to someone you like instead of three strangers, and two cakes come home instead of one. Couples, mothers and daughters, pairs of friends. Most of what we take, and the better classes for it.
If you have never really baked
Start at Cake Decorating Level 1. 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. You find out what meringue feels like when it is finally ready. The bowl gone cool under your palm, the whisk leaving tracks that hold their shape. Nothing arrives in a packet, and that is the point of doing it here instead of at home.
If your cakes taste good and look homemade
A buttercream problem, then, not a baking one, and 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, buttercream smoothed flat and a thick chocolate drip down the side. Level 3 is two days on a 15cm four-layer chocolate cake: proper ganache, caramel mousse, and piping. Piping is what separates a cake somebody made from a cake somebody baked. The numbers describe the cake, not a prerequisite. All three genuinely suit 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. You hear the difference before you taste it. A tempered shell breaks with a dry snap, glossy at the edge. An untempered one bends, then goes dull and greyish on the shelf. 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 French pastry more broadly is the draw, the one-day choux pastry class returns more per day than anything else on the list. Éclairs, profiteroles, croquembouche and the Paris–Brest all come out of the same dough, a dough that rises on steam alone. Watching a tray of it climb and hollow itself out is most of the day's reward. 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. A base that is right shatters under the fork instead of bending.
If you want a party, not 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. Four to twelve guests, Tuesday to Friday between 11am and 4pm. A party, not a workshop. Somebody always eats theirs at the table before the photographs are finished, buttercream on the fork, sponge still warm from the morning. Longer team-building formats run in one, two and three-hour versions, set out in four ways to book us for a group.
Picking a date is the hard part
Dates sit on the upcoming classes page. The full programme is on the classes page, and each class carries its own 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. Look at dates first.
For the decorating challenge we can provide brownie substitutes made with no added gluten. 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.
Ordering from the menu instead of 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. Doors open 10am to 9pm Tuesday to Saturday, and we close Sunday and Monday.
