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Pastry Chef / Cake Artist
Creates elaborate cakes, desserts, and confections that are both edible art and delicious.
Did you know?
In some old traditions a wedding cake was broken over the bride's head for luck; the fully edible tiered cake took off after a royal wedding in 1882.
How subjects help
- Chemistry: Understand how baking powder makes a cake rise and how sugar turns into caramel.
- Art & Design: Sculpt sugar and pipe icing into decorations that make a cake look like a work of art.
- Food Science: Keep creams and fillings safe to eat and swap ingredients for guests with allergies.
- Mathematics: Scale a recipe up for a giant wedding cake and weigh every ingredient exactly.
A famous name
Marie-Antoine Carême: French pastry chef famous for building giant sugar and pastry sculptures called pièces montées.
Try it yourself: Run a fair test with sugar
- Guess first: will sugar disappear faster in cold or warm water? Write your guess down.
- Fill one glass with cold water and one with warm tap water, the same amount in each.
- Tip a spoon of sugar into each at the same moment, stir each the same way, and time how long until it has gone.
- Was your guess right? What did you keep the same so the test was fair?
Chemists and researchers test ideas this way: change one thing, keep everything else the same, measure.
Also try: Find the repeat in a patterned fabric.
Known for it in
France, Japan, Italy, Austria, USA