My Parisian Baking Weekender - Part 1!!

For my birthday in June my amazing boyfriend got me the best present – a baking weekend in Paris. If you remember one of my new year’s resolutions was to do more baking classes/courses and my ideal would be to do one in France and now my resolutions were in action. My first task was to find an appropriate baking class that was in English as my French is non-existence. I googled Paris baking school, courses etc and one name kept coming up which was La Cuisine. I read a number of reviews on all their classes and everyone seemed to rate them as one of their best experiences on their holiday.

We headed down to Paris on the Eurostar early Friday morning and from leaving our flat at 6.30am, we had arrived at out accommodation in Paris by 10.30am. Paris is literally on our doorstep! Friday was spent wandering around, finding out where the school was for the next day… we found it – quick photo.



We then headed off to visit the café that’s in the movie Amélie and enjoyed a very greasy lunch, which came with a basket of bread (as did every meal in Paris).  After wandering around the streets for a bit we headed to the Musée du Romantisme for a quick coffee and then walked up the hill to Montmartre. En route we picked up some macaron tasters and enjoyed them in the sun overlooking Paris.






After all the walking we decided to head back to the room for a quick nap and then headed to over the bridges to Germain which was a recommendation from my best friend Lulu. The restaurant was not the cheapest but their interesting décor; including a sculpture of a woman spanning two floors and their mojitos were worth a visit. There was also this guy overlooking you on the way to the bathroom.

 



On Saturday my first class started at 10am and we headed down to the seine, before Pete went off for a morning run and I spent the next 3 hours covered in flour (I will do a separate blog with photos from the classes).  When I was done, our friend Dave happened to be in Paris and we met up with him and his friend Nick for a bite of lunch. I headed back for my macaron class and I believe the boys made their way to the pub. When I was greeted by all three of them at 5pm I was informed (in typical Pete style) that he had managed to get us on the guest list at the Rock en Seine music festival. There I was again, heading to a festival/club/venue with several boxes of baked goods in hand… though they are always handy to bribe security guards with! So we all headed out to the festival on the metro and enjoyed the evening dancing to disco until the wee hours of the morning, fueled by tasty crossiants and macarons.

 

Probably goes without saying that Sunday was a lazy day. We did try and head to some of the recommended places by the baking school for breakfast, but if you didn’t know (and I didn’t), many places shut down for August. Not only where the food places we were recommended closed down, but the baking supply stores were all shut too. It was probably best for my budget that all 5 baking shops were shut. After breakfast (at midday) and a long afternoon nap, we headed to the Eiffel Tower for probably the touristiest bit of our weekend and that was to take part on an evening Fat Tire bike tour. I had done a tour with them in Barcelona a few years back and it was great evening cycling through the Parisian streets. It included stopping off at Berthillon for some of the best ice-cream in Paris and Johnny Depp lives nearby so it must be good. It was a nice chilled tour, which not too much touristy information and wine!




Happy Baking x