The Pastry Project Is Everything We Love About Bakers
Photo by Karen Wang
our names
Heather Hodge and Emily Kim
our Home Base
Pioneer Square, Seattle
our Biz
The Pastry Project, which we started to make pastry education and jobs more accessible and to create opportunity for those who need it. The Pastry Project provides 14 weeks of baking and pastry job skills training, soft skills practice, and job placement assistance to individuals with barriers.
We work with several Seattle-area nonprofit partners who refer applicants to our program and over 20 Seattle bakery, dessert shop, and grocery store partners to help place our students in jobs using their skills after graduation.
Our free training program is funded through our classes for the public, corporate workshops, goody box memberships, and pastry kit subscriptions!
Heather and Emily in The Pastry Project kitchen. Photo by Karen Wang.
what we’re known for
Breaking down barriers to education and employment in the pastry industry
Cloud cakes from a Pastry Project Goody Box
Pop-tarts from a Pastry Project Goody Box
How we’re Doing
It's been crazy navigating a pandemic, especially being a place that was originally built to host in-person classes, but we've been able to pivot and have been doing a lot of virtual classes, pop-ups, and pastry kits! We've also been able to teach our Spring 2021 cohort of students safely in our kitchen!
The Spring cohort with Emily and Heather outside The Pastry Project
How the Bombesquad can help
Subscribe to our Pastry Kits, we ship anywhere in the U.S., and each month, we send you a kit to make a new batch of pastries at home. We try to make them unique and fun—and while you learn, you're helping others learn!
The Pastry Project’s March Kit collaboration with Bombesquad fave Hood Famous Bakeshop
Ube White Chocolate Blondies from the March kit
Secret Skill
Connecting people! We love building relationships in the community. We're obsessed with knowing everything that's going on in the pastry and dessert world in Seattle.
our Motto
Always have fun and do good
Most loved cookbook
We have a community baking and pastry cookbook library in our space that anyone can borrow from for free. That also means we have cookbooks around whenever we need inspiration or help with a recipe. We've been opening up Chocolates & Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner from the Culinary Institute of America a lot lately.
Favorite pantry item
Organic Red Ape cinnamon, it's from an amazing sustainable company in Oregon. We use it all the time because we do monthly Sunday Bunday pop-ups where we sell our classic cinnamon rolls, a couple seasonal buns, and a savory bun.
essential kitchen tool
Our giant vintage lavender Hobart. We found it on Craigslist and sanded and painted it ourselves! We use it when we make big batches of anything.
Dream mixer
Squad Shoutout
Lauren Ko of Lokokitchen! She's an amazing person and super talented pie baker and artist. She's also one of our kitchen residents at The Pastry Project, which means she uses our kitchen to work out of!
Lauren Ko’s Wave Of Wonders Pie. Photo by Ed Anderson Photography.