Cooking on candles at Tiny Cookery School

Filed away in a corner of the internet that might also include cats wearing tights (‘Meowtfit of the day‘)  – entertaining but also wholly baffling – is tiny cooking. The trend has been floating around in the ether for a few years, and there are Youtube channels with millions of subscribers creating miniaturised recipes, cooked on dolls’ house stoves using teeny utensils.

The results are adorable, and occasionally genuinely impressive. And now Bristolians have the chance to take part in tiny cooking classes, as local food and drink events company Foozie launches their Tiny Cookery School at White’s Botanicals.

While the staff, guests and drinks at White’s Botanicals are full sized, everything else has been shrunk to mini proportions. On top of the long tables are diminutive cutlery and sharp knives, tiny plates and bottles of oil, a cheese grater fit for a Lilliputian, pocket-sized black stoves with a tea light beneath and a set of saucepans and frying pans around an inch in diameter.

Foozie founder Thom Whitchurch, who is hosting the evening having spent the last few months buying dolls’ house furniture from the internet and perfecting tiny British recipes, bustles about bringing miniscule potions of ingredients to the tables, along with recipe cards. A waitress offers canapés as the guests take their seats, before Thom introduces the Tiny Cookery School and shows us a dish he made earlier. A portion of spaghetti and meatballs that would comfortably fit on a £2 coin sits, steaming, on a wooden dolls’ house table, accompanied by a bottle of wine no bigger than a thimble. It’s undeniably bizarre.

Tiny spaghetti and meatballs is one of the three dishes that Tiny Cookery School guests will make

The session is two-and-a-half-hours long, and it soon becomes apparent why. The first dish of spaghetti and meatballs requires us to hack apart a lump of garlic with a knife barely bigger than a thumbnail and for those of us who err towards cack-handed, the first challenge is simply to pick it up. The garlic remains stubbornly un-diced, and the resulting meatball mix is so pungent it could ward off vampires at ten paces.

However, after some false starts, and in a pan with a single droplet of oil heated below with a tea light, the meatballs begin to sizzle and brown, to shrieks of delight from the assembled guests and much Instagramming. Unbelievably, it’s actually working. We are cooking tiny food.

“Someone showed me a Buzzfeed video of tiny cooking and I loved it, I thought it was so cute and so different. It seemed very ‘Foozie’,” says Thom as a saucepan of water containing one single gulp comes to a slow boil, ready for some inch-long bits of noodle to be dropped in. “My house is full of dolls’ house furniture. The other day I was running around shouting, ‘Where’s my kettle and toaster gone?’ My housemate was like, ‘They’re in the kitchen where they always are’ – but I was actually looking for these tiny ones because they go so well with this kitchen set.”

In the three years that Foozie has been going, they’ve begun to host more of their own events as well as publicising the pop-ups other people are running. “So far, Bristolians have been really open to the boozy stuff,” Thom says. “We had massive success with last year’s retro crisp buffet and it spawned loads of copycats around the county. Tiny cookery hasn’t taken off as much as I hoped it would – we might be bringing it to Bristol before it’s ready – but once the Bristol public get to know about it more, we want to do some collaborations, and to work with some of the supper clubs to make tiny versions of their dishes.”

Foozie founder Thom Whitchurch oversees the first Tiny Cookery School

With the noodles cooked in slightly over-salted water (it turns out a pinch is quite a lot for a Borrower), it’s time to plate up. “This is taking me back to my Warhammer days,” one guest comments as he painstakingly spoons pea-sized meatballs onto a teensy plate, pours over a drizzle of tomato sauce and garnishes with a single piece of parsley. It’s truly a work of art.

The plates are brought up to the dolls’ house kitchen sets and placed on the little tables to be photographed like it’s a Barbie Masterchef competition. Someone tries to spear a meatball with a miniature fork and it evades the tiny tines. Lifting the whole plate up, he tips the meal into his mouth to eat all in one go, leaving just a smear of red sauce behind as evidence it ever existed. “Tastes just like spaghetti and meatballs,” he says, with more surprise than ought to be warranted.

Classes at the Tiny Cookery School start on March 15 and cost £22.50. To find out more or book tickets, visit www.foozie.co.uk/whats-on/tiny-cookery-school