A Sweet Tooth

So here is the second installment of the "Chefs of Fort McMurray". I decided to do Candace Cheney who has a home based business called "Nice and Sweet" as well as being the Pastry Chef at the Sawridge Inn and Conference Centre. I chose Candace for a million reasons...but mostly because she maintains my "Girlish Figure" with oodles and oodles of sweet things.

Alot of people in town have contacted me thru various means to ask if I could make a cake for "such and such" reason...I suck as a baker...I can do it, but my male "lack of patience" does not allow me to do it well. Candace on the other hand Rocks at it...and she is the person  I always hand people off to. She pushes the limits daily...and it shows in both appearance and taste in her work.

The final reason for doing her Bio is she doesn't get mad at me when I say "Nice Shitter!" hehe

 You can contact Candace for all your Baking needs at : candacecheney@hotmail.com or 780-715-5064

Name: Candace Diana Cheney
Age: 26
Position: Pastry Chef
Company: Sawridge Inn and Conference Centre / Nice and Sweet





Where did you attend Culinary School / or did you??
College of the North Atlantic in St Johns , Newfoundland. But I have been in the business since I was 14!

What did you find most difficult about this training?
Bread....not because it is hard to make, and I do it well....but because I dont have the patience to let it rise!!  I love bread.....mmmm!!!

Girl Cook.....

So today I wanna post a blog by my Wife....Christina! You can visit her blog at : http://acookswife.blogspot.com
 She is starting to get some traffic at her site...so I thought I would help the cause and post a link here. Everyone check it out :)

 Have women changed the face of professional cooking?

Traditionally all through time a womans stereotypical place has always been in the kitchen, the home kitchen that is. Actually I take that back it wasn't so much a stereotype as it just was what it was. I actually think traditionally that is where most women wanted to be, taking care of the home and spending time with the children. Whether thats because of the maternal instinct or because that is what they felt society expected of them, I don't know.  But oh how the times have changed, we see more and more men staying at home being the caretaker and more women being the career focused, financial provider.

With the help of many rights activists, world wars and social and economic upturns and downturns women have been able to explode into the work force, not without many challenges. This is true of the cooking industry, professional cooking is a male dominated industry, it has been very hard for women to break into this career. Which seems strange to me since as I said before a womens place was traditionally in the kitchen, it has been said that it is too labor intensive for women, but we have set out to prove them wrong and I think we have done a pretty good job.  With the likes of Alice Waters, the great Julia Child and more recently Anna Olson, Lynn Crawford and the list goes on, women have been taken more seriously in the professional kitchen.

I have been working in kitchens for a very long time and yes it has been with mostly men, but over the years I have seen more more women entering the industry actually I have worked in one kitchen where there was more women than men, not something you see too often. Currently where I work the head pastry chef is a woman and the last place I worked the only sous chef was a woman . But I have never had the pleasure of having a women executive chef.  There are more male head chefs than women... do I believe that is because they are better cooks, or women just are not getting the recognition they deserve, no not all, being that there is more men in the industry it seems to only make sense that more men would be head chefs.

A Cooks Valentine's Day!!