vegan baker

In Patagonia. More later.

It is important to stay friends with people from college so that you have a floor on which to sleep when you decide that it is completely necessary to your happiness to attend a cake decorating school 25 minutes out of a major city which is not yours. This way, you can “hang out” and also advance your “career.”

What am I talking about? Wilton Master Class and my friend Aaron. Aaron and I knew we would be friends forever when I first mended his flaming boxer briefs way back in late adolescence. Now I’m going to get all signed up for some (not vegan at all) cake mastery and drink some (totally vegan Chicago Diner) milkshakes with Aaron. It’ll be good.

As for the Wilton stuff, I am willing to spend a week working with nonvegan stuff for the sake of years of vegan versions that look great. I’m hoping to donate what I make in class to Food Not Bombs or someone else local who’ll know what to do. I am pretty excited, in a RPG sort of way, about being a “master” of a craft.

The challenge in getting educated as a vegan pastry chef is in replacing all the parts of traditional culinary school. Someone is going to have to teach me all about sugar sculptures and then give me a paper that says I’m a success.

The current project: I’ve been looking online for cake decorating classes that end in a certificate. They won’t be vegan, but I can grunt my way through a little bit of what repulses me (I did work in ice cream stores, of course.) The problem seems to be that the world of cake decoration is a backwards-facing racket.

All the design on these websites looks circa 1995. This bothers me because these are people I would pay to teach me to produce superior-looking food. Fondant, commercial marzipan, modeling chocolate… these things do not taste good, they look good. The people who teach them should care about aesthetics. They also charge more than I am comfortable with for classes I already know most of. I haven’t been professionally taught, so I’ll have to start at the beginning.

Wilton has a strangle-hold, but unless I head to some tiny town in Illinois, I’d be striving towards their expensive certificate in a Micheal’s. Now that would make me feel like a pro.

This post is not about lemon pound cake. It’s about how I need to move on up to the big house of stoves that actually work, unlike the one I baked this in.

The transition I am looking at these days is the one from home cook (warrior of the decrepit oven, king of the lazy substitution, master of using up leftovers) to professional pastry chef, a mysterious and elusive creature in the vegan world.

Here is a little Associated Press article about vegetarian cooking programs. One of the four is raw, and another is macrobiotic. I think it should be clear after my last post that I don’t like to muddy veganism with faddish, spurious health-consciousness. So that leaves the School of Natural Cookery in Colorado and the Natural Gourmet Cookery School in NYC. It’s not much of a choice, since I don’t think I’ve ever been to Colorado and my parents live 30 minutes out of Manhattan (yes, I do find it mortifying to stay with them, even temporarily, thank you for asking.)

So for those of you who see me in Jersey, I’ll probably be around this summer or fall. I’ll undoubtedly be saying “chef” a lot. I hope you find it endearing.