Whisk up some fun with these online cooking classes for kids and teens

Sign up your teens and tweens this summer for an online cooking class where they’ll learn new skills, experiment with recipes and ingredients, explore better food choices, and even make you a rather lovely lunch

Fri, 04 Jul, 2025 - 01:00

Caroline Hennessy

IT’S ALMOST noon on a school holiday Tuesday, and the kids are ready to go. Since 11am, they’ve been checking their recipes, busily weighing, measuring, and preparing ingredients.

Now it’s time to log in to the Zoom call for the start of their Cookalicious online cooking camp, featuring 90 minutes of high-energy entertainment with a solid focus on that day’s assortment of dishes.

It might be a day for soda bread pizza, Italian frittata, and energy balls, or pasta salad with ham and cheese jambons and lemon drizzle squares.

No matter what’s on the menu, there’s one thing for certain: everyone is going to sit down together to a feast afterwards, the participants will try everything, and, even better, for parents who are trying to juggle work at the same time, there’ll probably be leftovers for supper.

Since Oranmore-based Cepta Mahon started her online cooking classes for teens and tweens in 2020, she has beamed into kitchens throughout Ireland to teach hundreds of children about the joy and long-term value of cooking.

She’s not just teaching children how to make that day’s lunch: she’s educating them — and their parents — about nutrition, confidence, and the value of a home-cooked meal. Her classes are also a lot of fun.

“We should all be able to throw together simple dishes that don’t take a huge amount of time,” she says. “I like to make dishes that are doable and relatable and that all members of the family, whether they’re seven, 17 or 47, are going to enjoy.”

With three children of her own — Clodagh (19), Orla (17), and Liam (13) — she has developed a knack for picking winners. Many of the dishes kids try for the first time in a Cookalicious class go on to become regularly cooked family favourites.

“I use basic ingredients. There’s nothing in there that you couldn’t get in your local shop or supermarket. These are all bog-standard staples that people should have in their own homes or be able to get easily in supermarkets.”

Cepta Mahon: “I started doing classes from my own house because people wanted to learn but didn’t want to go to a school or an educational establishment.”

Mahon, who had a career in finance before she moved into the world of food, had been teaching adult education cooking classes in Galway before deciding to go out on her own.

“I started doing classes from my own house because people wanted to learn but didn’t want to go to a school or an educational establishment.”

Her experience in tackling food education from an alternate angle came in handy during covid.

“I was a mom with three kids trying to do the homeschooling thing,” she recalls, “and making an absolute shambles of it. I just knew we needed things to keep the kids going and keep them entertained.”

It’s easy to forget how helpless and isolated we all felt during that time of lockdowns and isolation, where normally sociable children were stuck at home with screens, rather than being able to learn with their peers.

“I wanted to do something to help and knew I couldn’t do anything in the health area,” says Mahon, “but my speciality was cooking and engaging people and drawing them in and being able to teach and help them create dishes. I just thought, ‘Let’s go with the online thing and see how we can figure it out’.”

Figure it out she did, and Mahon has continued ever since, successfully running her popular three-day camps (€55) during the Easter, summer, and Halloween holidays when kids are at home and free to learn skills, recipes, and be exposed to new foods. The live classes take place on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, starting at 12pm and continuing until about 1.30pm. There’s also the option of cooking along with the recording at a later time, on a date or at a pace that suits your own family.

After signing up, participants are sent a recipe pack that includes a full ingredients list — helpfully broken down into categories — with encouragement to check what you have at home before going shopping. Wise advice for cooks of any age.

Mahon regularly orchestrates classes that involve 50 or 60 screens — some with multiple children involved — tuning in from all around the country.

“Zoom makes it very accessible,” she says, “and payment is per screen so that you can have a friend or a cousin — or a dad — involved. You can have fun in the kitchen with them, cooking together and divvying up chores. That in itself is a life skill.”

Cepta Mahon: “We have to nurture kids and encourage them because the only way they’re going to learn is by doing. As parents, we have a responsibility to educate our kids and teach them to cook."

After a recent camp, one mother told Mahon that her sons, aged 15 and 13, did everything.

“Going to the shop, getting the ingredients themselves. Doing the preparing, the chopping, the cooking, the cleaning. This mom said that never in a million years did she think they would have been capable of it.”

Mahon has found that most children — she now has a 50:50 split of boys and girls attending her classes — are far more capable in the kitchen than their parents give them credit for.

“We have to nurture kids and encourage them because the only way they’re going to learn is by doing. As parents, we have a responsibility to educate our kids and teach them to cook. Trust them and encourage them. Don’t be bothered with the mess,” she adds. “It’s so easy to clean up afterwards.”

She is also adept at adding nuggets of food education to her cook-along commentary.

“I want to teach them about healthy, nutritious food, that it’s important to know where your food is coming from and to avoid food waste.”

In classes, participants “learn about the importance of cooking from scratch as much of the time as possible,” she explains.

Mahon’s enthusiasm transcends the small screen, as she cooks and engages with kids in their kitchens, bringing them from hesitantly peeling and chopping to proudly presenting a selection of delicious dishes for their families to enjoy.

“We’re giving them skills for life and the wherewithal to make better food choices,” she says, “and we’re hoping that they’re going to be able to be independent enough to move out of home and cook for themselves and, in time, cook for their own families too.”

It’s an investment in the future, with the rewards arriving on your kitchen table from day one.