Pastry & Baking Arts and Management Associate Degree Program

In no other field of the food industry do art and technique combine so beautifully as in pastry and baking. Your hands-on education starts with our pastry chef-instructors, who will guide you through the crucial components of the baking craft. You'll cover a wide range of pastries and begin with a comprehensive exploration and tasting of ingredients to learn how flavors and textures combine. Over the course of the baking school program, you'll experience lessons with multiple chef-instructors, exposing you to a variety of mentors with different perspectives and areas of expertise in the pastry arts. In addition, with a strong emphasis on theory, our pastry school curriculum will teach students the essential techniques of cakes and chocolate, highlighting the key ratios and methods that allow you to go beyond recipes and create your own formulas. Our pastry school program will show you how to decorate cakes by hand until inscriptions and piping become second nature. Ultimately, students have the opportunity to apply these skills and create tiered cakes of their own design. Chocolate confections are also part of the curriculum, from the simple truffle to intricate showpieces.

ICE’s Restaurant & Culinary Management program offers pragmatic training in restaurant management, operations and entrepreneurship. Our experienced instructors will teach you how to develop profitable concepts, write a business plan and market your venture to a target audience. You'll get a sense of how to troubleshoot bakery, restaurant and bar management issues concerning operations and staffing, analyze changing trends and make fiscal modifications to keep a business profitable. You'll train to make strategic business decisions with case studies, role-playing and group projects; have a chance to gain valuable professional insights from prominent guest lecturers; and study menu design, social media marketing, kitchen and interior design, and wine tasting and appreciation.

Students take online courses that are relevant to restaurant industry careers, such as the history and culture of food, social psychology, business communication, leadership, change management and more. You'll study subjects as they apply to the business of foodservice, including written and verbal communication strategies as they relate to recipe writing, reviewing, food blogging and culinary demonstrations; team building through developing and empowering people; and nutrition in terms of dietary preferences and the relationship between diet, health and disease.

After 400 hours of careful instruction and practice in our pastry arts program, you are ready for the exam that matters: working in a professional kitchen or bakery. Through our externship program, you will spend 210 hours on-site in a restaurant, bakery, hotel, catering kitchen or other culinary enterprise. With myriad options available, we pride ourselves on the diversity and caliber of our professional network. You will put your pastry arts skills to work in real time in an actual kitchen outside of the classroom walls. Best of all, these externships frequently turn into job offers and provide you with invaluable contacts among professional pastry chefs and bakers for the rest of your career. You will live the excitement of pursuing your dream. Your externship and our Career Services will help you explore careers inside and outside the kitchen.