I am so excited for today! I somehow convinced Mom to take two cooking classes with me at the King Arthur Baking School in Burlington, WA. Burlington is about an easy 2-2.5 hour drive from Sea-Tac airport and the baking school is located about 10 minutes from the “downtown” area.  Burlington, to me, is a small town surrounded by fields of brussel sprouts and dairy cattle. There are stores to cover the needs of residents as well as hotels, restaurants, and shopping for visitors. I learned about King Arthur’s Baking Schools through a friend and have been to the one in Washington twice though I am still working on visiting the one in Vermont. 

Mom and I stopped by Whidbey Island Bagel Factory for breakfast. Whidbey Island Bagel Factory offers a variety of bagel flavors as well as breakfast and lunch sandwich options. The bagels here are amazing and their cream cheese spreads are delicious! I ordered an egg and cheese bagel sandwich and a plain bagel with the bacon spread and the Sockeye salmon and caper spread. Everything tasted great and was easy to eat in the car on the way to the baking school.

The King Arthur Baking School (KABS) is in a small plaza location and the doors open about 15 minutes before class begins. You check your name off, make your name tag, select your workstation, don your apron, and wash your hands before beginning. The instructor usually does a short introduction of how the class will go as well as covering general housekeeping topics such as restroom locations and class format. Once class officially begins, the instructor will demonstrate then you get to dive in! 

We are taking two classes today, the first class being the Rustic Summer Tart class. This class lasted three hours (9am-12pm) and we made both a sweet and a savory tart. Making multiple tarts meant that we sort of moved back and forth completing steps for both tarts simultaneously. We began by making our dough, dividing it in half, and allowing it time to chill and rest. We used the same dough recipe for both sweet and savory tart which made the process easier. Next, we sliced tomatoes, put them on a sheet tray lined with paper towels, and salted them. We set our tomato slices aside to allow the salt to pull out some of the moisture while we mixed the peach filling and assembled our crostata. A crostata is very easy to assemble; you simply roll out the dough, pile the filing in the center, fold the edges of the dough up and over to create a lip which holds in the filling, and then chill before baking. It  has a rustic or homemade look and isn’t quite patisserie pretty but that doesn’t impact the flavor! 

Once the peach crostata was chilling and baking, we assembled our savory tomato parmesan tart. For this tart, we rolled out the dough, cut it into a square tart base, and added our filling of cream cheese, tomato slices, parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper before baking. We had a few minutes while our tarts baked which was perfect for clean up and assembling the boxes to take our baked products home. The baking school also has a small store on site that they open during the bake and clean up time and you can purchase flour, seasonings, small kitchen tool, cookbooks, t-shirts, etc. Soon our tarts were out of the oven and we boxed them up and prepared for the final part of the class … tasting! One thing that I personally enjoy about the KABS is that you taste the items the instructor demonstrated and take all of your creations home! Not only did we get to taste both the sweet and savory tarts in class, but Mom and I both took home a peach crostata and a tomato parmesan tart each! Our class ended at noon and we had an hour before our next class started so we decided to take advantage of the picnic tables outside and eat one of our freshly baked tomato parmesan tarts for lunch. We thought ahead and packed a small cooler with some drinks so we were able to chat and enjoy the product of our class. We’re both excited to get home and into the kitchen to recreate these tarts as well as create our own version of them!

Our second class of the day, Crafting Croissants, began at 1pm and continued until 5pm. This is the class I was a smidge nervous about because I’ve always heard how difficult croissants are to make but I thought, with the help of the KABS class and their incredible instructors, we would be baking these flaky beauties at home in the near future. I was trying to be optimistic until I saw the class whiteboard and started wondering if I had severely underestimated the difficulty of crafting croissants. There are nine steps for making croissants which generally take three days to complete: 1) detrempe or dough and rest, 2) beurrage or butter block, 3) lock-in, 4) 1st fold and rest, 5) second fold and rest, 6) third fold and rest, 7) cut and shape, 8) proof, and 9) egg wash and bake. The process can be condensed into two days with advanced planning and preparation. Our instructor had done a lot of pre-class preparation and had dough ready for us to work with so that we could learn all the steps and was wonderfully patient and incredibly knowledgeable in answering our questions. After the four hour class, participants took home two baked plain croissants, two chocolate croissants, a detrempe, and a fully laminated packet of dough plus the skills and knowledge to finish the croissants at home! 

We had originally planned to drive to North Cascades National Park, and specifically Diablo Lake overlook, but the roads were closed due to a wildfire to we opted to drive out to Deception Pass State Park instead. Deception Pass is a short drive from the KABS and it is a great place to get out and walk around, taking in gorgeous views and even some seal watching if you keep your eye on the water! It is $10 to access the park for the day and a worthwhile visit in my opinion though you should take layers as it can be quite chilly with the wind. 

We spent an hour or so at Deception Pass and watched a couple seals bobbing along in the water before we decided to drive back to Burlington. We ate dinner at Tacos Tecalitlan and, honestly, I was slightly disappointed. It wasn’t that the food was bad but it also wasn’t what I expected and I don’t think it lived up to the positive reviews. A croissant snack made up for it though and was a sweet, and rewarding, way to conclude our day of cooking adventures in Washington.