Thanks for stopping by with your questions.

In terms of paving a way for your educational path with B&P, follow your heart is what I say. There are thousands of branches of this field and I’ll be lucky if I truly understand a couple dozen of them before I die.

What do you love to bake/ make? What are the ingredients of those items? Do you understand absolutely everything about how the egg works? Flour? Sugar? Yeast? Chocolate?

Because I trained in restaurants for most of my career (until Citizen Cake which was a Bakery and a restaurant), I learned primarily about how to make plated dessert components and their design. I loved working seasonally and restaurants tend to do this more than hotels or bakeries, so my path became defined when I saw what I wanted to work with most: fruit.

If you have more of a question that I have given you an answer for, please feel free to email me directly– there is a link on Eggbeater.

Best of luck to you,
Shuna Lydon

From your blog, another thing came to mind. What are the various options one has after having learnt the art of baking and Pastry? Work in a bakery, a restaurant kitchen, food journalism etc….

Thanks.

Thank you!

When I decided to get out of technology journalism soon thereafter, I followed my heart into food. I knew I didn’t want to work in a kitchen again — I’d done the restaurant and bakery thing during high school and college — but I wanted to have some formal culinary cred to augment my editorial background.

I started out in the weekend program at CCA, with the intention of transferring to the full-time diploma course when I exhausted the weekend material. I was shocked to find a disorganized, undisciplined environment where my peers were more interested in slacking their way to a cushy chef job than in actually learning anything, and chef-instructors who were willing to give a passing mark to any old slop (a classmate’s mayonnaise made with egg whites comes to mind). Needless to say, the experience didn’t impress me sufficiently to make me want to continue.

But I’m glad I did it, if only because the structure of what I learned there was something I don’t think I could have picked up while working full time in a different profession. And because my end desire wasn’t to land in a restaurant, but to make a switch to cookbook editing or food journalism, my needs were different.

I look back on some of the crap I did at school — memorizing brown-sauce variations, turning potatoes into seven-sided foodballs — and realize they’re the equivalent of junior high geometry: Utterly useless in the real world, but a thought-provoking exercise for someone fascinated by the subject at hand.

Did a formal culinary education help my career? Nope. Was it fun and exhausting and interesting? You bet. And every now and then, I pull some little bit of culinary-school trivia out of the back of my mind, and smile.