My daughter loves going to the ‘P.P.P’ which stands for Plate Painting Place. This is also her favourite tongue twister. It’s a cafe where you paint ceramics – plates and cups and bowls and teapots. She usually paints a plate. They fire your art in a kiln when you’re done and you collect it a few days later. It’s fun to do and you get to drink your tea in a fun homemade mug afterwards.
My idea is for a children’s cooking cafe. A place to go and make cakes, or sweets to give as gifts, or just to go and have fun creating your own lunch. You may think, ‘If I want to do that I could do it at home.’ But my cooking cafe would take away all the boring dull bits, like finding a recipe, shopping for things, and weighing out the ingredients, and of course clearing up! Cafe customers would just do the fun mixing and decorating bits. Kids could go along and ice their own cakes or make an ice cream sundae. It would be fun for grown ups too, it could be a more active kind of lunch date with a friend. You could glug a glass of wine as you chopped and stirred, with an expert advisor on hand to help you if you got stuck. And afterwards you could giggle about the shoddy cooked results as you ate.
I think the only problem might be worries about letting the public have a go with sharp knives and hot ovens. Maybe the only way to do it would be if the cooking cafe assistants did the slightly-dangerous bits, although that would be a shame.
