Baking and Pastry Arts

Begin your career as a baker or pastry chef! Through hands-on training, students will study traditional and contemporary baking methods, the basics of pastry, cake decorating and contemporary dessert plating. Through classroom lectures, students learn baking theory, nutrition, trade calculations, sanitation, food safety and business concepts to support skills used in the daily operation of a bakery. Using global industry trends, graduates are prepared to critically think, innovate, and to professionally apply business management skills for lifelong career success as a baking professional in all sectors of the food service industry or as entrepreneurs.

Graduates may find work locally, provincially, nationally and internationally as a pastry chef, bakery manager, or retail baker in a variety of settings, including fine dining restaurants, hotel pastry departments, baking suppliers, catering companies, and boutique pastry shop outlets. Graduates also find employment as business owners by combining the skills they have learned with their entrepreneurial spirit to start and operate a successful business.

What You’ll Learn

• Identify the workings and the effects of ingredients on one another and predict how the end product will be affected.
• Perform problem solving and troubleshoot recipes.
• Perform basic techniques involved in the daily production of a bakery or pastry shop.
• Recognize and produce both classical and modern baked goods.
• Apply food safety principles and practices as identified by the local health unit.
• Apply basic mathematical principles and recipe conversions, bakery formulations and percentages.
• Practice skills used in the daily operation of a bakery, including cost controls, food cost, percentages, labour cost and inventory controls.
• Apply basic entrepreneurial strategies when considering new business opportunities within the hospitality and tourism industry.
• Utilize environmentally sustainable practices.