What Can Baking and Pastry School Do for You?

By Jane Smallman
Jane.Smallman@hqpublications.com
Culinary Columnist

If you really like cooking and particularly enjoy inventing and producing tasty pastries and breads, or decorating cakes for special occasions, perhaps a career where you can spend all day doing this would be perfect for you. Find out how a course at a specialized baking and pastry school can help you on your way to a successful baking career.

Baking and pastry school will help you to turn your enthusiasm for creating specialty breads and pastries into a rewarding and interesting baking career. Courses are available at a variety of levels, from the certificate to the bachelor's degree.

What Will Baking and Pastry School Teach You?

Whichever level of course you choose, certain skills that are essential for a baking career will be included, such as:

Basic cooking techniques, with emphasis on the preparation of specialty breads, desserts, pastries, patisserie and other confections
Cake decorating
Chocolate work
Nutrition
Menu planning
Food safety
Cost control
The history of baking and pastry traditions around the world

At the associate's or bachelor's degree level, the school is also likely to include courses such as the following:

How to make your baking and pastry business profitable by using marketing, finance and computing skills
Managing and communicating with others.

What Sort of Jobs are Baking and Pastry School Graduates Qualified For?

Whichever baking career you have in mind, baking and pastry school will prepare you with the skills and knowledge necessary for a wide variety of jobs. You can:

Focus on your bread making skills and pursue a baking career as an artisan bread baker.
Develop your teaching skills and become a baking and pastry instructor.
Start your own café, bakery or patisserie.
Open a cake decorating business.
Specialize in chocolate work and become a chocolatier.

About the author

Jane Smallman runs a mountain guiding business with her husband. Her early training was in hotel management and she has worked in the hotel industry in France, Holland, the US and the UK. Following this she worked in an administrative capacity for a number of not-for-profit organizations in the UK, including the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Refugee Legal Centre. While doing this she earned a degree in Social Sciences through distance learning with the Open University. After graduation she progressed to the University of Sussex as a full-time student where she was awarded a Masters Degree in Social and Political Thought.

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