Baking & Pastry School!

image: Steve Adams for Cookie Swap

Last week was the first week of Baking & Pastry School! A year ago I might have never guessed that this is where I would be now, but then again – a year ago I was sitting restlessly while watching the architecture firm I was working at slowly crumble under the burden of the heavily distressed economy. At the same time, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing right now.

Over the summer I knew that I loved baking, and spent a good amount of my spare time mixing things up. In the fall I thought I’d give it a try professionally and work at a bakery/pastry shop, just to see if I’d still enjoy it under the pressure of production. In October I started studying every culinary school from New York City down to Washington DC to find a fitting baking program. By Thanksgiving I had applied to the Art Institute here in Philadelphia, for their Baking & Pastry specific program, and reorganized my already tight finances to make it happen.

The program is a year long, run on a quarter system which is totally new to me. Because of the truncated quarters instead of semesters, the courses are all at least four hours long, if not two days a week as well. Luckily, I’m used to long classes of this sort thanks to design school. There are three classes per quarter to help accommodate working students, which is sorta where I’m at these days. This quarter I’m taking the basic courses, Intro. to Baking (which is also a Culinary Arts class – I’m the only B&P person in it), Kitchen skills for Baking (All B&P students, learning how to use every imaginable piece of equipment), and Safety & Sanitation (for everyone – you just gotta know it!).

Contrary to popular belief, there’s some of this:

and of course, plenty of this:

This time around though seems pretty different, and I don’t just mean the content of the program. When I was in school for my bachelor’s degree college WAS my life. I lived at school and ate at school, and anything that I did was either for school or with people from school. Five years of SCHOOL. This time it’s different because I have a life that I’ve started to build, and I’m fitting school into it. 16 hours a week substituted with class time, and a couple of hours a week of reading or homework where I’d otherwise be reading for pleasure or goofing off. I see a lot of the kids in my courses and think, “Wow, they just graduated from high school.” But I’m not the only older student, there’s plenty of people with other jobs, families, and lives that are fitting a little bit of education into it all as well. Ultimately, it’s just great to be learning about and spending my days doing something I really enjoy again.