Upcoming Events: Please come join us or volunteer

We are again volunteering for the Meals on Wheels Celebrity Chefs Ball held annually at the Marshall Fields State Street Building, now Macy's. This event is on Oct 13, Friday, and we will need a couple of students to help set up. Before that day, we will need several volunteers to make and bake, decorate petit fours, about 1300 pieces in all. Please email myself or Chef Montanile for details.


The next meeting of Pastry Chicago will be on Monday, October 23. Bob Hartwig of the French Pastry Scholl will do a lecture on cheese and wine pairing. Our very own cafe is hosting this event that starts at 6:00 PM. Please come and join us.

Also, on October 23, our visiting Pastry Chef from LeCordonBleu London will arrive that morning. Watch for the schedule of his demos that will be open to students. Culinary students should take advantage of these free demos and baking and pastry should mark their calendars.
It's a great opportunity to learn at no additional cost.


The Gingerbread Competition that the school is hosting in cooperation with Pastry Chicago and the Windy City Chapter of the ACF will be held here at school on Dec 2, a Saturday. For an application form, please ask Chef Montanile or myself, and we'll also leave copies at the Front Desk starting next week. This competition will be open to all culinary schools and high schools in Illinois, so make us proud by volunteering for the event and submitting a showpiece. It is open only to current students.

Teacher's Favorites

Does that happen? Maybe...You come every day. You come on time. You come in complete and clean uniform. You submit homework , and you submit homework on time, you come prepared, and motivated, and with great attitude about learning. You bring your passion for baking, or pastry or cooking, you don't complain that you will never ever going to make a wedding cake ever(because it is part of the program, and you know that), or you don't say you've seen enough sugar competitions on the Food Network, that you know you'd be good at it. You are a good team player and help others with clean up even if you're done with your assigned task. You have initiative. You participate in school activities. You are creative, but if you are not, you work hard on it. You are a good listener, observant, and a great deal of humility.

Then you are the teacher's pet.

more baskets

Students working on sugar baskets

Sugar Fruit Basket

Sugar baskets made as part of the PB1300 class. Baskets are from cooked sugar while fruits were blown from isomalt.

Gingerbread House Workshop

September 20, 2006 is the next L'Atelier du Patissier Workshop. We will mix, bake and assemble gingerbread houses on Wednesday at 4:30 PM. We will have another workshop in October to finish the houses. If you have any idea or design for your house, make sure to bring them in Wednesday. The theme for the workshop will be Winter Wonderland. The houses cannot be bigger than 12x18.

This workshop is open to any CHIC student, baking or culinary. Also, there will be a PastryChicago Gingerbread Competition in November that we are hosting, this will be a good preparation for the competition.

So, hope to see you all on Wednesday, K 201

Dessert Platter

It was a good turnout last night for the latest BK111 Dessert Platter Presentation. We had some guests come all the way from Gibson City Illinois and a lot from the Northeast section. I always appreciate family supporting the students and seeing what they can accomplish after just three baking classes.