The Cookery featuring The Parlour

When my friend Pam won tickets through the Stir-Crazy Moms Blog to attend a cooking class at The Cookery in downtown Durham, I was thrilled for her. When she invited me to tag along as her plus one, I was even happier!
We got to choose between different classes offered and narrowed down our selection to a chocolate class, which was taught by Vanessa Mazuz, owner of The Parlour, a local ice cream truck that opened this past year.
Pam and I were pretty excited; we'd be preparing French-style hot chocolate with caramelized white chocolate whipped cream, ginger-spice chocolate bark, and chocolate pepper cookies during the class. I was most excited to taste our creations, and to check out The Cookery. We were told we'd have to wear hair nets...so that was our biggest discouragement. hehe
Neither of us wanted to bring along our professional cameras because we just wanted to enjoy the experience and it is really hard to do so when playing photographer.  Pam however, did bring her smaller digital and snapped a few quick shots for us, which I'll be featuring on this page.  Thank you Pam!

 

Chocolate pepper cookies, cooling on plates - these were phenomenal and had the warm gooey texture of freshly baked brownies.

Ginger-spice chocolate bark, topped with candied ginger and drizzled with white chocolate spiced with cardamom.  DIVINE!

Pam and I, no hair nets ended up being required as long as our hair was pulled back.

 Parlour owner Vanessa scooping out servings of the french-style hot chocolate.

The french style hot chocolate was the one menu item I thought I might pass on.  Come to realize it was heavenly as well.  I guess I hadn't had hot chocolate in about a decade.  If you make it well, it is thick and creamy and frothy and addictive.

 

Extra servings of bark and cookies to take home with us.  

I will now be experimenting with bark very soon, perhaps today.

Thank you Pam for inviting me. I really enjoyed this experience!