Still on our mission to hone and enhance our culinary skills, at The Amazing Blog we have been searching around for baking lessons, to make all your dreams of baking that perfect soufflé come true, which is when we found The Cookery School at Little Portland Street. It is one of London’s leading and most sustainable cooking schools.

Founded In 2003 Rosalind Rathouse, who even prior to the inception of Cookery School, she has been fervently passionate about sustainability. Cookery School has the highest possible rating for sustainability from the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) and has been virtually plastic-free since the beginning. From sourcing top quality, seasonal, mostly organic ingredients, to running the kitchens on renewable energy, what we like is that the school does everything possible to minimise its impact on the planet.

With a focus on the sustainability and education, they endeavour to demystify cooking, removing jargon and celebrating good home cooking skills. Their kitchen is run with the environment in mind, so they only use high quality, sustainable, primarily organic ingredients and equipment that can be found in most home kitchens

Cue The Ultimate Baking Course this takes you through the key principles of cakes, pastry, breads, macarons and meringue making, plus cake decorating. Quite simply, they will teach you the skills required to bake well. They have three options i.e. either the weekly course which includes 8 sessions, the intensive course which is a 4 day course or the Sunday course which takes place on every Sunday of the month thus giving you the option to best suit your schedule.

Priced at £880, The Ultimate Baking Course runs throughout the months of February, March and April and is worth both the time and the money as you will leave with the skills and knowledge of a professional baker. Browse through their official website to find a course best suited for you here.

We try our hardest to be sustainable at The Amazing Blog, both as a collective and as individuals. As hard as we try, it can seem like a daunting issue with many problems and fewer solutions, so when someone told us about Jimini’s we were intrigued and keen to try their alternative and delicious protein and energy bars.

Jimini’s hope that simply by introducing a new sustainable and healthy source of nutrients they will be able to change the world. What is this new source I hear you asking? Well, it’s very straightforward, insects. Now we know what you are thinking! For years we have been conditioned into believing that eating bugs is gross. In fact, if you bought a delicious snack and found a bug in it you probably throw it out or even threaten to sue somebody, so why would you buy energy bars made of the stuff? Well Jimini’s use cricket flour, dried fruits and almonds in their bars. You cannot taste the insects whatsoever, just as you would be unable to taste the flour in any other energy bar, cake or piece of bread – it’s entirely flavourless. Unlike regular flour though, cricket flour is rich in protein, fibre and iron. In fact, there is there is twice the amount of iron in crickets as there is in spinach! Wouldn’t Pop Eye have been very different if they had known that then? What’s more 100g of crickets contains 63g of protein, while beef only contains 55g and chicken only 25g!! Crickets also require less space water to look after, which is a huge sustainability issue at the moment. Cows require about 10 hectares of land and 22000 L/kg of water while crickets need 1 hectare and less than 10 L/kg of water. Crickets also produce 99% fewer greenhouse gasses than cows do.

2 billion people around the world eat insects, so really it is just our western sensibilities getting in the way of our ability to see past their exterior and ignore the wonderful and amazing benefits that they offer. The flour itself is entirely flavourless, full of fantastic benefits and the bars themselves are delicious. We purchased a variety pack; the pack included all four flavours; Banana and Dark Chocolate, Dark Chocolate and Fig, Apricot, Goji and Chia and lastly Apple and Cinnamon. If you do manage to pick a favourite, which is tough as they are all delicious, then you are able to purchase only that flavour. Pick up a variety box of these wonderful and sustainable energy bars here for £6.81.