Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared lists of my favorite ingredient-focused and vegetable-centric cookbooks, but what kind of pastry chef would I be if I didn’t provide a list of dessert cookbooks? Having authored two cookbooks— Desserts for Every Season and Modern Eclairs—I’m fairly opinionated about what I’m looking for in a great pastry book. From beautiful photos and essential techniques to foolproof recipes, the following texts are among the dog-eared classics I return to time and time again.

When it comes to hospitality, ICE Culinary Management Instructor Kate Edwards ranks among the industry’s most respected service experts. With a resume that includes stints at Keith McNally’s Balthazar bistro and Thomas Keller’s fine-dining mecca, Per Se, Kate has long worked with the food industry’s finest.

This Valentine’s Day, you can do better than chocolate-dipped strawberries. Impress your sweetheart with a foolproof recipe for romance: a heart-shaped pastry that’s easier to make than it looks. At ICE, we've teamed up with People magazine to reinvent the palmier—or “elephant ear”—with homemade pink sugar for an extra DIY twist.

Preserving seasonal produce is one of the world's oldest culinary traditions. Growing up down South, the end of summer meant two things: the start of football season and time to start “puttin’ up.”

From an outside perspective, a hotel may simply appear to be a place to spend the night, but for those of us in the hospitality industry, a hotel is a well-oiled machine, dependent on the efficient operation of every gear and screw. At ICE, as hospitality management students, we’re fortunate enough to experience the inner workings of hotels through guest speakers who are actively working in the hotel industry.

Previously harvested, fermented and dried at origin, cocoa beans arrive at ICE’s Chocolate Lab ready to transform from raw bean to finished chocolate bar through cleaning, roasting, winnowing, milling, refining, conching and tempering.

Whether you believe in making resolutions or not, the beginning of a new year is a time we associate with starting over and making a change—especially when it comes to dietary choices. Vegetables get a lot of love in the January push toward healthy eating. As a chef, I would advocate an increased focus on vegetables for dozens of other reasons—especially for the incredible range of creative ways you can cook them.

When we think about international cuisine, it's usually on the level of countries: French, Italian, Chinese, American, etc. Yet within each culinary culture, there are regional variations—from coastal seafood to hearty cold weather fare, poverty-inspired vegetable dishes to luxurious desserts.

Did you know that each year more than 24,000 cookbooks are published worldwide? Our unyielding appetite for new recipes and cooking techniques has made compiling a single “must-read” book list a daunting task for even the most well-read chef. So instead, I’m sharing a few short lists of game-changing texts—from food science tomes to classic pastry cookbooks—that have broadened my horizons as a culinary professional. First up, let's take a closer look at the core ingredients so many of us take for granted, from cheese to chocolate.

It may sound obvious, but the first step in the chocolate making process is bean selection. No two beans are alike, each offering distinctive flavor characteristics impacted by genetics, origin, farming and post-harvest handling—before they ever arrive at a chocolate production facility.