Book excerpt: For many people, pastries, cakes, chocolates, and sweets come ready to eat right from the grocery store. If they're lucky, a local bakery or chocolate shop satisfies the community's sweet tooth. Few people think they have the skill or the time to tackle something as seemingly complicated and time-consuming as homemade pastry. In The Pastry Chef's Apprentice, author Mitch Stamm simplifies a culinary school's core pastry curriculum and teaches the reader just how quickly you can go from sifting and stirring to spectacular. The masters featured in The Pastry Chef’s Apprentice teach classic pastry skills, such as caramel, pate a choux, tart crusts, and more, to the amateur food enthusiast. Through extensive, diverse profiles of experienced experts plus fully illustrated tutorials and delicious recipes, the reader gets insider access to real-life chefs, bakers, culinary instructors, and more. With these new skills—or just the chance to revisit their old standards—everyone from casual cooks to devoted epicures will learn dozens of new ways to take their kitchen skills to the next level. Featured chefs include: Laurent Branlard, USA: restaurateur and Executive Pastry Chef at the Swan and Dolphin Resorts at Disney World Frederic Deshayes, France: Chief Pastry & Bakery Instructor at At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy Thaddeus Dubois, USA: former White House Executive Pastry Chef and Culinary Mentor Robert Ellinger, UK/USA: owner of Baked to Perfection, founder of the Guild of Baking and Pastry Arts, and international pastry competition judge Lauren V. Haas, USA: Assistant Pastry Chef at Albert Uster Imports and Instructor at Johnson & Wales University Thomas Haas, Germany/USA En-Ming Hsu, USA: Chef Instructor at the French Pastry School in Chicago William Leaman, USA: World Champion Baker and Owner of Bakery Nouveau in Seattle Iginio Massari, Italy: Author, Restaurateur, and Founder of the Academy of Italian Master Pastry Chefs Kanjiro Mochizuki, Japan: Executive Pastry Chef at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo Ewald Notter, Switzerland/USA: Founder and Director of Education of Notter School of Pastry Arts Kim Park, South Korea: owner of the Green House Bakery and captain of South Korea’s national pastry team Jordi Puigvert, Spain: founder of Sweet‘n Go, consultant, and professor at the School of the Hotel de Girona in Spain Anil Rohira, India/Switzerland: Corporate Pastry Chef for Felchlin Switzerland and coach and judge for national and international competitions Sébastien Rouxel, France/USA: Executive Pastry Chef for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group Kirsten Tibballs, Australia: Founder of Savour Chocolate and Patisserie School in Melbourne Franz Ziegler, Switzerland: Author and Consultant