Mom, the Pastry Chef: I’ll tell you something lucky about myself. My mom is a pastry chef. That means she works in a restaurant and makes desserts every day. It’s pretty awesome! I... Mom, the Pastry Chef: I’ll tell you something lucky about myself. My mom is a pastry chef. That means she works in a restaurant and makes desserts every day. It’s pretty awesome! I always have the best birthday cakes, and she brings home a lot of leftover treats. Another benefit is that when we eat at a restaurant, we order every dessert on the menu so that my mom can see what other chefs are doing. My friends and I all love this. There are some parts of a pastry chef’s life that are a little challenging, though. They have to get up super early in the morning, for one thing. And they don’t have weekends like everybody else; Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are really busy days in restaurants, so my mom has Mondays and Tuesdays off. That’s a bummer for me because I’m at school those days. Restaurant people eat at restaurants a lot as part of their job, and it’s kind of cool, but sometimes we have to go to stuffy places where they don’t really like kids and the food is weird. Speaking of weird food, sometimes my mom will try really strange things. Like one time, she made a cucumber sherbet sprinkled with elderflower blossoms! The adults all thought it was incredible, but I didn’t really like it. Another hazard for pastry chefs is sometimes they just get sick of sugar. Last night, my mom said it was time to take a break from sugar. She brought a creamy sheep's milk yogurt to the table, which she served with dates, orange zest, and a tiny pinch of flaky sea salt. That’s when I said, 'This is not dessert! Bake me a cake!' Read more