Cooks Academy Celebrates 10 years with Pixels and Palates event

I was invited to the Cooks Academy 10th Birthday celebrations in their school on South William Street in Dublin last night. It was a great event with presentations from Socialmedia.ie on how to grow your followers and Rachel and Brian from Nobó, an Irish dairy free ice cream, spoke about how they have developed from a very small start-up, and from tomorrow, will be available in every SuperValu across Ireland. Allan Dixon who won the competition for the best job in the world for Tourism Australia gave a presentation about Instagram and how to engage users through photos.

During the event there was a ‘Cook, Shoot, Tweet’ Challenge where food bloggers were invited to create a Christmas-inspired street food dish from a variety of cooked ingredients including turkey, ham, cranberry sauce, avocado, pineapple salsa, along with a variety of vessels to hold the food including tacos, wraps, melba toasts, and lettuce cups, and then photograph it using the Sony pop-up studio which made for excellent lighting I must say (may need to invest in one of those mini tents for food photography!). 

Variety of ingredients available

Thanks to Sony Xperia for the awesome pop-up studio

I chose to make “A Tropical Christmas” which was a lettuce cup with some shredded turkey, topped with a salsa guacamole that I made using avocado, tomato, lime and some of the pineapple salsa, garnished with a little watercress. I wanted to keep my dish clean so steered clear of the carb vessels and the sugar and fat laden items such as the cranberry sauce and mayonnaise.

Some of my chosen ingredients

Georgia Eats Clean hard at work

Salsa making time

We then had to tweet the photo using #cooksacademy10 and they would be judged on appearance and ingredients only - it wasn’t a taste challenge - but as soon as I was done photographing mine, it was eaten and wow was it delicious, I will definitely be making them again at home.

Perfecting my shot

A Tropical Christmas

Me with my creation - A Tropical Christmas

The prize for the best photo went to Dublin by Mouth who made an edible Nativity scene which, I have to say, did look excellent. First prize was a place on the Cooks Academy 4 week certificate course which is an absolutely amazing prize. I will admit to being a tad jealous of the winner. But the Cooks Academy have kindly given me a promotional code to share with my readers which is 20% off any short course, the code can be used up until 31st March 2015 to book a short course even if the course takes place after 31st March. Use the code ”gclean969” when booking online or over the phone.

To book a course online check out www.CooksAcademy.com or phone +353 1 611 1666.