Learn How to Bake Afternoon Tea with BBC Good Food

Boost your baking techniques and improve your recipes:

The course will help you explore recipe ideas for the bakes you love – and help you to explain why each one works.

You’ll learn what to look for in ingredients, and how to start exploring bold new flavours to really bring your afternoon tea bakes to life.

Once you’re comfortable with the essentials, you’ll see how you can vary your ideas and make your bakes even better.

Learn through interactive cooking sessions:

You’ll pinpoint how you could become a better cook, by learning to annotate and improve recipes – as well as reflect on the inevitable odd failed bake!

Learn how to decorate your afternoon tea bakes, and get the inside track on exactly what bakeware and kitchen kit you need to bring your biscuits, buns, and bites to life.

An important part of baking is the culture around it. With interactive and animated online lessons, you’ll also examine the role that baking plays in everyday life.

What topics will you cover?

This course covers five bakes that would be found at a classic afternoon tea: scones, sugar biscuits, madeleines, eclairs and macarons.

The course starts at the easier end of the scale and ends with the most technically difficult, allowing learners to build on their knowledge. Each class also suggests variations for the bake in question, as well as serving suggestions.

The course also includes:

• How to read and amend a recipe

• What to look for in ingredients

• Bakeware and kitchen equipment tips

• How to get creative with decoration

Learning on this course:

You can take this self-guided course and learn at your own pace. On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

• Learners will be taught to describe the mechanics of cooking, and in particular baking.

• They will be encouraged to investigate the behaviours that they will create around them as they cook, the cultural role that baking plays in life and how to become better cooks.

• Learners will be able to research and collect recipes that they want to try based on being able to evaluate the written instructions

• They will learn how to ‘read’ or interpret a recipe to see if it is workable, and to annotate it, to improve it

• Learners will be encouraged to be brave when cooking, to explore new flavours and experiment with different ingredients.

• They will be taught how to reflect on failure if it happens, assess possible causes and modify techniques.

Who is the course for?

This course is designed for beginner to intermediate bakers.

Whether you want to learn how baking works so you can be more experimental with your bakes, you’re looking to avoid unhealthy bakes and want to bake from scratch with family, you’re interested in becoming a baking hobbyist, or you’re an experienced baker and want to add new abilities – this course has something for you.