If you are creative, love food, and love to play with food, you can consider a career in Culinary Arts. Culinary means anything that has to do with food. Art, of course, implies something artistic and/or interesting. People who pursue this can choose from several different branches. Some have to be trained in nutrition and how properly to make a balanced meal that looks good. Other branches do not care about nutrition. If it tastes and looks good people can eat it. In the second category people can have fun with food colors, fondants, frostings, various types of sugars, and many designs. In short, they can make and decorate elaborate cakes.
Basic cake makers may start out just making beautiful cakes. There are many pans and patterns to help. When they are ready to get more elaborate, then it is time for fondant, which is a thick frosting that can be molded and cut, and allowed to dry almost like clay. It can be rolled into flat sheets and cut by hand, or there are machines that cut this into different patterns. One can make edible 3-D cake topers with this. Sugar can be delicately carved and formed into various shapes. A glass slipper is one good design to make from sugar and put on pastry.
When people are really advanced, they can make some very life-like treats. They might make a dog so life-like; people will be offended at a dog on the table. This often involves using inedible tubing as the “skeleton” of the cake. Various kinds of fondant and icing are used to create realistic eye lashes, hair, and other parts. The results can look almost too good, or in the case of one shaped like an octopus, too gross to eat. No matter the shape, it should still taste delicious.
Many artists want their artwork to last forever, but that is not likely to happen when the sculptures are made of delicious food. However, if you do not mind spending days on something that may only be admired for hours, then you may want to start looking at the best places and ways to learn the art. You can start with books and practice at home. From there you can start a hobby career. The real money can be made when you start or work with a big company that makes fancy foods for high dollar parties and especially weddings. The odds are you will not get to the big company stage without a more formal education, unless you have lots of money, and/or a lot of natural talent.
There are many schools that offer you a chance to learn all the basic, medium, and advanced methods of cooking, and will coach you as you try those methods with real food. Some schools are mostly for people who already do this, but want to get the highest Culinary Arts training they can. You can probably find at least one good school in your state. There are online classes, but with those, the teachers cannot easily see and grade your progress. You should be able to get basic beginner’s knowledge online.
Culinary Arts is not usually something that will pay high dollar per hour especially at first. The really fancy chiefs may spend hours trying to get a small part just right. Once you are more experienced, you can probably work faster and doing more jobs in an hour often means getting more money per hour. You can get a job where flat decorations are mostly done by a machine, but then you do not get to be creative.