Certified Food & Beverage program updated

The American Hotel & Lodging Educational Institute (EI) revised its Certified Food & Beverage Executive (CFBE) professional certification program to better reflect current food and beverage trends and standards.

After receiving input from industry experts and the EI Certification Commission, EI added new content areas and competencies to all six CFBE topics covered in the program. These topics are are: managing food operations, managing beverage operations, marketing and sales management, financial management, leadership and human resources management.

In addition to content changes, the CFBE resource materials have been reformatted. Candidates now receive a competency-based exam preparation booklet with three-volume resource materials on CD. There is also a new review session with PowerPoint presentations, new sample exam questions and new certification exam questions.

Candidates for the CBFE program must hold a position as an executive level manager or food and beverage director of a hotel food and beverage operation, general manager of a freestanding restaurant or executive chef with at least two years' experience in one or more qualifying positions. For additional information or to download an application, visit www.ahlei.org/cfbe.

For the Love of Chocolate Foundation receives support from businesses

For the Love of Chocolate Scholarship Foundation, which provides scholarships to qualified students of The French Pastry School at City Colleges of Chicago, has formed partnerships with home/work furnishings provider Coalesse and mask and costume provider Zagone Studios. Coalesse has donated $1,500 to the foundation, and Zagone Studios will contribute 5 percent of Internet sales from now through Halloween.

This is the second straight year that Coalesse has sponsored For the Love of Chocolate Foundation. On Oct. 14 Coalesse will team up with The French Pastry School for a special sugar sculpting demonstration from French Pastry School chef John Kraus in the Coalesse showroom at The Merchandise Mart. For more information, visit www.coalesse.com.

McDonald's executive vice president and COO to address Lexington College

Jan Fields, executive vice president and COO of McDonalds USA, will be speaking to Chicago's Lexington College students, staff and faculty Oct. 5 at 2 p.m. in the college's Library.

In her current role, Fields oversees operations for the more than 13,700 McDonald's restaurants in the United States, and she began her career as a crew member in 1978. She has been honored with many awards, including McDonald's President's Award, the Golden Arch Partners Award, the Women Operators Network Recognition Award and the Women's Leadership Award.

Fields, an advocate for people development, is actively involved in the company's mentoring and diversity programs, acting as executive sponsor for the career development program and speaking at many Diversity Network meetings.

On Nov. 2, Lexington will also honor Fields and her continuing leadership in the hospitality field at the "Building Scholarships for Service" Annual Benefit Dinner at Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile (previously posted about here). For more information, visit www.lexingtoncollege.edu.

Wedding cakes course offered at the French Pastry School

How a wedding cake tastes is just as important as how it looks. Chef Donald Wressell, in his fourth year at The French Pastry School of Chicago, will teach Wedding Cake Construction and Tasting from Oct. 6 to 8, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. The course will cover how to create a cake that tastes extraordinary and is well-constructed, even when you are under pressure to produce a high volume. In this three-day hands-on class, participants will focus on the baking, filling and building of wedding cakes. Chef Wressell will guide participants through flavor profiles and textures, along with a range of cakes and different filling combinations. Once you have all the components, it is time to build your cake ensuring the structure is safe and stable. Chef Wressell will share invaluable tips and tricks to producing high-volume quality cakes in the shortest time possible.

This course is accredited by the American Culinary Federation for 24 Continuing Education Hours (CEHs). For more information, visit www.frenchpastryschool.com.

(photo courtesy of The French Pastry School)

And for more great opportunities to learn about wedding cakes--as well as many other topics, from baking and pastry to savory preparations and culinary education advancements--visit www.fenisummit.com to learn more about the 2010 Foodservice Educators Network International (FENI) Educators Summit, Feb. 12 to 15, 2010, in Chicago!

Diversified Foods gives $20,000 to ECU hospitality

Diversified Foods Inc. (DFI) presented the Department of Hospitality Management at East Carolina University (ECU) with $20,000 at its Tournament of Friends Golf Outing at the Lane Tree Golf Course in Goldsboro, N.C., on Sept. 19. The funds, which were raised through tournament entry fees and sponsorships, will be used for scholarships for hospitality management students in the current school year.

This is the ninth year that DFI has donated proceeds from the Tournament of Friends for hospitality student scholarships. In that time, the restaurant management concept has donated more than $100,000 total. Approximately 135 golfers attended this year's event. At a dinner following the tournament, DFI owner H.M. Poythress presented a check to chair of ECU's Department of Hospitality Management, Bob O'Halloran.

CHIC pastry instructor earns CMB designation

Nancy Carey, a baking and pastry instructor at The Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago (CHIC), was granted the Certified Master Baker designation by the Retail Bakers of America (RBA). This is the highest level of baking certification.

Carey has been an instructor at CHIC since 2002. Before that, she founded and developed Red Hen Bread, a wholesale and retail artisan bakery in Chicago. In order to earn the designation, Carey worked a minimum of eight years in the industry and passed several written and practical tests and participated in seminars.

Q&A with the Culinary Institute of Michigan's John Cappellucci

By Maggie Shea, Chef Educator Today

The final hours are ticking down on the Sept. 24 grand opening of The Culinary Institute of Michigan (CIM) at Baker College in Muskegon, Mich. The three-story, 40,000-square-foot culinary facility took 18 months to build and houses a specialty pastry lab, three hot food labs and state-of-the-art demonstration classrooms, as well as a new restaurant and pastry and coffee shop. CIM currently offers four degree programs: Culinary Arts Associate of Business, Baking and Pastry Certificate, Food and Beverage Management Associate of Business and Food and Beverage Management Bachelor of Business. Before classes officially start on Sept. 28, John Cappellucci, dean of the culinary program, took a few minutes out of his busy schedule to talk to CET about the new culinary facility and how it will bring the CIM to prominence among regional and national culinary institutes.

Final renderings of the Culinary Institute of Michigan facility

CET: How many students are currently enrolled in the four degree programs?
Cappellucci: Right now we're over 400 students. We're what's called a "right to try college," so we try to accommodate as many people as we can within the physical confines of the building. We're running classes from 7 in the morning until 11 at night, 6 days a week.

CET: How will the new facility improve on the culinary arts program offered by Baker College?
Cappellucci: We have a chocolate lab for chocolate and sugar work that's temperature- and humidity-controlled. We also have a demonstration kitchen with theater-type seating. We're going to have three high-definition cameras [in the demo kitchen] with the ability to do our own video editing and develop our own video content for our classes. In the future we'll be able to do live broadcasts right from here. The teaching kitchens also will all have flat-panel televisions that will have the capability to bring up any of the demonstrations or anything we have stored so students can view them right in the classroom for a refresher or to give students an idea of how the demos work.

CET: With the new facility, name and logo, how does it feel to make this change and sort of brand yourselves as a culinary school?
Cappellucci: Of all the campuses within the Baker College system, we're the only one that has a culinary program. In the interest of utilizing our resources to the best of our ability, we wanted to do something that wasn't just going to serve the people of Michigan, but we wanted to have a more regional presence and hopefully, within a few years, develop a national presence as well. It is definitely a branding opportunity for us. We have gorgeous facilities, and we're really going to be able to do some stupendous things here.

CET: Will Courses restaurant and The Sweet Spot pastry shop be run by students?
Cappellucci: The restaurant is exclusively run by students. There is a front- and back-of-the-house instructor, but for the most part, [the students] run the show. That's part of the curriculum. The Sweet Spot, which is our coffee and bakery outlet, will be just that--an outlet for baking and pastry products. Right now we're in the midst of hiring people. It will be student- and staff-run.

CET: How do you plan to use the Web to help you market yourselves?
Cappellucci: Well, this project has spurned a lot of other things to happen. One is that we've tried to take some of our marketing to social networking opportunities. We're trying to have a lot more visible Web presence. We have some individuals that help us with maintaining Facebook pages and Twitter sites--things that are a little beyond my years I guess! That's a really important part. I recently read somewhere that libraries are becoming more underutilized as people go to the Web more and more to do their research. And I think when you look at the opportunity for us to have a presence as far as our own original content and the ability to do webcasts and podcasts, we'll be able to have a nice niche as far as culinary schools go. Everyone talks about opening the classroom to the world, but I think we're trying to open the world to the classroom so we can have instructors from anywhere with the ability to stream on the Web and add content to our own video library, so to speak. We're also trying to go as paperless as possible. We're going from giving multipaged, photocopied handouts to actually burning CDs for students so they have the ability to go back and reference them; it's a more durable way of saving that information.

CET:Are there ways you are being more green in your teaching kitchens?
Cappellucci:We're trying to develop a partnership with the community garden here locally. They need an opportunity to recoup some of the input costs of their efforts, and in trade, we're going to give them whatever kind of organic materials we can for their compost efforts. In return, they will also give us some of the product they're putting together. They have big plans for putting up some hoop houses [to extend the growing season] this winter, so we'll have access to fresh herbs and lettuce greens and things like that. ... We're super-excited. It's getting down to the 11th hour, and everyone's a little edgy. But it's really going to be the best culinary program that we could have put together.