I’ve worked as a Pastry Chef in an upscale restaurant and baked desserts for a bread bakery for several years. I’ve also worked at a cake bakery frosting cakes 8 hours a day.

Now my day looks much different than when I worked in a commercial kitchen but I’m still up to my elbows with batter!

At the bread bakery, I prepped all the ingredients the day before, showed up at 4:30 a.m. the next day to start mixing, whisking, and scooping. I made teacakes, scones, cookies, and cinnamon rolls that all came out of the oven by opening time at 7 a.m. Afterward, I would help knead loaves of bread then prep the ingredients for the next day and I was out by 12:30 p.m. I’d take a 4-hour nap and do it all again the next day. It was exhausting but I loved the work and my snarky coworkers who became dear friends.

When I worked as a Pastry Chef I would show up around nine to prep cakes and pies making sure to be out of the kitchen before the line cooks came to prep for dinner. Once they came the kitchen was one big traffic jam and it was harder to work.

Pros and Cons

There are several pros and cons to life as a baker. Holidays are the busiest times so don’t expect to take a week off at Christmas in fact depending on where you work they could be your longest days. I worked 13 hour days around Christmas time at one cake bakery I worked at.

It’s also not the most lucrative position. If you’re in it for the money baking isn’t for you. It’s certainly possible but not the rule.

Of course, it’s very fulfilling if you love to do it. You get to see a tangible, tasty, and oftentimes beautiful result of all your hard work. It’s something you’ve put together that brings others joy and that is very gratifying. You get to be an artist in the kitchen and for the creative types who adore baking, there’s no better feeling.

These are some of the things I remember about my years of baking!

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