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A couple of weeks ago, I was very kindly invited down to the Wood oven for a night of pizza making & a cupcake frosting masterclass. Now I will admit I’ve never been to the Wood Oven before, but I had the best night, plus with it right on the seafront by Boscombe pier it was a lovely location, and I honestly can’t wait to visit again.

Myself & a few other local bloggers were shown up to the upstairs of Urban Reef, (which is next door to the Wood Oven, and both owned by Mark Cribb) where we were given complimentary cocktails & shown seats to begin the first part of our night.

The Owner – Mark – who I mentioned above introduced himself and some of the team, and told us about his story. After travelling and living in London for a while he developed a love for hospitality, soon after he came back to Bournemouth, Mark decided to create a unique, lively place right on the beach, mixing his inspiration of London and his travels around the world together, and So Urban Beach was born. Now there is a restaurant, cafe, bar, farm and craft beer and the Urban Guild is very much established.

Mark was incredibly inspiring, and If you want to know a bit more, check out urbanguild.co.uk

And a fun fact, did you know that it takes 1000 days to grow asparagus!? Who knew!

The next part of our night was Pizza making! Yuuum! We were first shown how to handle the dough and turn it into our base, I have to say their head chef made it look a lot easier than it was, once our base was created, we then got to pick our toppings. There was a big table with a beautiful mix of toppings which were all locally sourced (where possible).

Now I definitely didn’t make mine the prettiest, but it was tasty; tomato base, Winchester Cheese, Cajun chicken, pulled pork and red onions (i forgot the mozz – what a mistake, but it was still yum!)

This is where we split in to two groups, the first group went downstairs to the wood oven, whilst we (the second group) had a go at decorating cupcakes. Their resident baker had come in with some cupcakes she had already made, and a white chocolate frosting (It was HEAVENLY!)

Again it looked a lot easier than it was, but it was still fun, and they tasted wonderful!

It was then our turn to cook our pizza’s, the wood oven cooked all our pizza’s at once, and only took a few minutes to do so! It was really brilliant. We ended the night by tasting all the pizzas (its a hard job but someone has to do it eh!?) and then voted for our favourites, the top 3 of which got a spot on the menu for 2 weeks at a time.

Unfortunately mine wasn’t one of the top 3, but the ones that did get voted the most for were delicious, & I had such a wonderful night, plus it was really lovely to meet some local bloggers too.

I would thoroughly recommend going to the Wood Oven if you’re local. Incredible pizzas, and the staff really go the extra mile to make sure you have a great experience!

Thank you again for the invite, I will definitely be returning very soon!

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