My nine-year-old son loves cooking. He’s always dipping his finger in this and tasting that, telling me what I should and shouldn’t put in his navarin of lamb, and he makes the best rice pudding. My wife is terrified he’ll want to be a chef, but what’s the worry, I say. Let him enjoy it – there’s still plenty of time to teach him about split shifts, the minimum wage and varicose veins.

The other week, he, his younger sister and I went on a children’s cookery course – a bit of quality father-son-daughter time. The children thought it was a fantastic treat, learning to make their own ravioli and swirly chocolate brownies, but the truth is, it wasn’t for them, it was for me. You see, however much I want them to be interested in food and to experiment with different flavours, I hate cooking with them. It’s not just the mess (although I admit I’m not great about that), but worse, I am, to borrow the parlance of the boardroom, very “results driven”. If we are making breaded goujons of plaice, I want them to look as bright and golden as a mermaid’s tail, not like sea slugs with urticaria; I want our fairy cakes to be as airy as Felicity Wishes, not Jade Goody in a tutu. It’s a curse, I tell you, and one I hoped Stephen Bulmer would be able to lift.

As the former chef/director of Raymond Blanc’s cookery school at Le Manoir, he must have seen it all. So, now that he’s set up on his own, at Brook Hall, a beautiful Queen Anne town house in Winslow in Buckinghamshire, could he provide the solution?

“The secret is to relax and enjoy it yourself,” he says. “If you interfere, the confidence goes, and they won’t like it either. Pick something quick and easy, so they don’t get bored, and don’t worry about the results. The other day I had a class all making pasta, and I told them to roll it out really thin, and some didn’t listen. But when they came to eat it, they all loved it anyway, because they had made it themselves. And that was the time to suggest that, if they’d made it thinner, it would be less chewy. You’ve let it go, but you’ve still got the message across.”

One of the most impressive things about Bulmer’s courses is that he resolutely refuses to dumb down. He’s not beyond putting on a few funny voices (think Widow Twanky without the cross-dressing), but he’ll explain to a six-year-old the science of what is happening – how the acid in the lemon is breaking down the protein in the chicken, or how the yeast is feeding off the sugar. “I learnt a long time ago that if you start talking down to children, that’s when the aggro sets in.”

There’s certainly no dumbing down in his pre-Christmas classes. Six to eight-year-olds can make stained-glass biscuits and fig and mincemeat filo crackers on an edible Christmas decoration course; nine to twelve-year-olds will learn how to help with Christmas dinner, from preparing sprouts (“Don’t put crosses in the bottom”) to tips on the turkey, stuffings and gravy. Does that mean he and his wife Joanna will sit down to lunch prepared by their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter? “I wish! They’re still a bit young yet, but they’ve each got their roles.”

And, I’m pleased to say, my son and I have reached a happy compromise. A few days later, I came home to find he had made chicken chow mein while I was out, thereby removing me from the equation without hurting my feelings. See, I knew he wouldn’t be a chef – with diplomacy skills like that, he’s clearly bound for the Foreign Office.

Brook Hall’s Christmas classes run from December 19-22 and cost £65 (01296 712111; www.brookhall.net )

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