Pastry Chef CV Examples & Writing Guide

A fictional CV for a pastry chef with ten years across a high-street bakery, a resort hotel banqueting kitchen and a chef-led restaurant. Kitchens hire on volume and cost control, so almost every bullet carries a count, a percentage or a pound figure.

Pastry hiring is fast and practical. The chef reading your CV already knows what a pastry chef does, and is trying to work out whether you can hold their volume without help.

• Volume and format. Covers a night, banquet numbers, weekly production numbers. "Plated 60 to 90 desserts a service" tells a chef more than any adjective.
• Kitchen type. A hotel banqueting pastry chef, a restaurant pastry chef and a wholesale bakery production chef have different strengths. Say which kitchens you have worked in and for how long.
• Menu ownership. Did you write and cost the menu, or execute someone else's? Say plainly which one, and how often the menu changed.
• Cost and waste. Food cost percentage, waste percentage, labour hours. These decide whether a chef can justify the hire to the owner or general manager.
• Food safety certificates and the kitchen's hygiene rating. A Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate is the baseline and Level 3 is expected for anyone supervising. Keeping a 5 food hygiene rating through inspections is worth a line.

“Everyone sends me a CV that says creative and passionate. What I need is the number of covers you have held on a Saturday and your food cost. Put those two things in the top three lines and I will call you.”

Three lines: years and kitchen types, volume, and one number that proves you control cost or quality. Save the career objective for career changers and college leavers.

The problem with most pastry CVs is not the writing. It is that they list the job description instead of the shift. Add the count, the cost or the timing.

Three groups. Techniques prove your range, equipment proves you can walk into their kitchen, and the business skills are what separate a pastry chef from a commis.

• Techniques: lamination and viennoiserie, enriched and sourdough breads, chocolate tempering and bonbons, sugar work, entremets and mousse cakes, plated dessert composition, ice cream and sorbet, custards and curds, cake decorating and piping, mirror glaze, isomalt and showpieces
• Dietary: gluten-free formulation, vegan and egg-free baking, nut-free production lines, allergen matrices for the 14 major allergens and cross-contamination control, reduced-sugar desserts
• Equipment: pastry sheeter, spiral and planetary mixers, deck and convection ovens, retarder-prover, blast chiller, chocolate tempering machine, ice cream batch freezer, vacuum packer, dough divider, airbrush
• Business: recipe costing and yield calculation, par sheets and production planning, stock control and ordering, supplier negotiation, rota planning, menu engineering, EPOS and stock systems (for example Lightspeed or Kitchen CUT)

You do not need a licence to work as a pastry chef in the UK, and the only legal requirement is that food handlers are trained or supervised in food hygiene to suit their work. But two of these move a CV, and one of them is often a condition of employment.

• Food safety certificate. A Level 2 Food Hygiene (Food Safety in Catering) certificate is expected of every chef, and a Level 3 award is usually asked for anyone running a section or a department. Put the year on the page.
• Allergen management training. Short courses at Level 2 or 3, increasingly asked for by hotels and larger groups, especially since the rules on allergen labelling for food prepacked on site (Natasha's Law) came in.
• Patisserie qualifications and apprenticeships: a Level 2 or Level 3 diploma in professional patisserie and confectionery (City & Guilds or a similar awarding body), or a Commis Chef or Chef de Partie apprenticeship. Write the full title, the level and the awarding body once.
• HACCP training if you have worked in production or wholesale, where it may be part of the site's food safety plan.
• Competition entries and medals from recognised culinary competitions, with the year and the class. A judge's medal tells a head chef more than a line about passion.
• Formal education: a patisserie diploma, a hospitality degree or a completed apprenticeship. List the college and year, and add stages or guest work in respected kitchens as a short line, not as fake employment.

Do not invent a qualification, and do not write "qualified pastry chef" without saying which qualification and level. Chefs in this industry know the routes, and the wrong claim is the kind of thing that comes up in the first two minutes of an interview.

Three kinds of people search for this: college leavers, commis or line chefs moving to pastry, and self-taught home bakers going professional. Each needs a different first section, but none of them should apply for a pastry chef title straight away. Apply as a commis pastry chef and get there in two years.

1. 1College leavers: put the industry placement where a job would go, with the venue type, length and what you produced. "16-week industry placement in a 300-bedroom hotel pastry kitchen: viennoiserie, banquet plating and cake finishing."
2. 2Commis and line chefs: translate what already transfers. You know mise en place, ticket times, fridge rotation and how a Saturday feels. Say how many covers you have held and add whatever pastry work you already do, even if it was just staff meal desserts.
3. 3Home bakers: count your work. Orders filled, farmers' market sales, cakes delivered, and the fact that your home baking business was registered with the local council. "Filled 380 bespoke cake orders over two years as a registered home baking business in Bath" is real experience.
4. 4Get a Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate before you apply. It is inexpensive, takes a few hours online, and removes a barrier for the chef.
5. 5Ask for a trial shift. Say on your CV or in the cover letter that you are available for one. In this industry a good trial shift beats a good CV.

The same ten years of experience reads differently depending on where you send it. Reorder the top half for the kitchen you want.

• Restaurant: lead with plated dessert composition, menu writing and cover counts. Chefs want someone whose desserts fit the food already on the menu, so mention the cuisine and the price point.
• Hotel and banqueting: lead with guest numbers, staging and multi-outlet production. Show that you can hold quality when 900 plates leave at once, and mention wedding cake work and reading function sheets.
• High-street bakery: lead with early-morning production volume, counter displays, bespoke orders and consistency. Sales per day and waste percentages matter here.
• Wholesale and central production kitchens: lead with batch sizes, delivery windows, HACCP, allergen control and yield. This is manufacturing, and the CV should read like it.
• Cruise, contract catering and events: lead with scale, food safety records and stock control, and mention any experience with fixed cycle menus.

One page, or two if you have more than about twelve years and several venues worth showing. No photo of yourself. Single column with plain headings, because hotel and restaurant groups use applicant tracking software (often Harri or Fourth) and columns break in it.

• Use the exact title in the advert: "pastry chef", "pastry sous chef", "pastry chef de partie", "commis pastry chef", "baker", "cake decorator". They are filtered separately.
• Include the words "plated desserts", "viennoiserie", "lamination", "banqueting" and "food cost" if they describe your work, since these are searched terms in hospitality systems.
• Name venues by type and size when the name means nothing outside your town: "120-cover chef-led restaurant", "220-bedroom resort hotel".
• Keep the portfolio link in your header line, not in a footer where it gets cut.
• Send a PDF named Duarte_Elena_PastryChef_CV.pdf, and be ready to hand a printed copy to a chef, because plenty of kitchens still hire that way.