Pastry Art & Design Magazine: Feb. 2008
Going for Gold, while thinking green
-working with recycled silicone-
By Michael Joy

Every two years, the World Pastry Team Championship brings together chefs from around the world to reach for the gold medal. While the chefs work on their showpieces, the audience watches with tense excitement to see the results of their artistry and innovations. As spectacular as the chefs’ five-foot tall chocolate and sugar sculptures are, there is another—equally compelling—story behind their creation. That story consists of the second team. It’s made up of sponsors, coaches, alternate chefs, assistants, managers, creatives ...

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Pastry Art & Design Magazine: Feb. 2007
Silicone Simplicity
Modern art with minimal effort
By Susan Notter and Michael Joy

Some chefs have the ability to make things look easy. Pastry Chef Susan Notter is one of these people. She is among a growing number of pastry chefs being asked to provide an artistic bridge between classical hand skills and innovative new casting techniques. As a seasoned competitor, Susan knows judges want to see strength in hand skills such as pulled and blown sugar. She also recognizes that they want to be surprised with new designs and techniques...


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Calligraphy Transformation Part 1
from inspiration to presentation
By Susan Notter and Michael Joy
Pastry Art & Design Magazine: Dec. 2007

Creative chefs are always looking for new designs to incorporate into their culinary artwork. While studying sculpture in art school, I learned that new ideas can often be found by looking into the past. When discussing showpiece design with chefs, I recommend they turn to calligraphy for inspiration. In fact, it doesn’t take long to find a Chinese or Japanese character whose composition has both exciting motion and appealing balance. With some slight modification, a calligraphy character can be transformed, from a two-dimensional shape into a three-dimensional form. In this article, Pastry Chef Susan Notter and I have...

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Calligraphy Compostiton Part 2
By Susan Notter and Michael Joy
Pastry Art & Design Magazine: Dec. 2007

Susan Notter has spent more than twenty years traveling the world teaching and demonstrating sugar artistry to chefs, pastry chefs and culinary students. She is a seasoned competitor and a master of blown and pulled sugar decoration, as well a co-author and contributor to several pastry books. Mindful of the time constraints that chefs face and the realities of the industry, Chef Notter has chosen to demonstrate how quickly and easily a casting mat can be used to create modern, expressive centerpieces. ...

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Vinyl Clarity
By Michael Joy and Chef Anthony Chavez
Pastry's Best Magazine: November 2007

The secret is out. When smooth, glass-like transparency is needed for your sugar work, vinyl is the way to go.

Executive pastry chef Anthony Chavez from Sofitel Chicago Water Tower and Michael Joy from the Chicago School of Mold Making worked together to create unique effects for his run at the 2007 Paris Gourmet’s U.S. Pastry Competition.

Each year, chefs from around the nation gather in New York City to compete for the title of Paris Gourmet’s Pastry Chef of the Year. As with any competition, unique challenges must be overcome...

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Casting To Win
By Michael Joy and Chef Paul Bodrogi
Pastry's Best Magazine: August 2007

Is there a place for silicone molds in pastry competitions? The 2007 Culinary Casting Challenge, sponsored by the Chicago School of Mold Making, wanted to put this question to the test. Instructed to use silicone molds in as many different ways as possible, seven student chefs came up with great answers.

A year ago, friends Paul Bodrogi and Michael Joy hatched a plan to organize a new type of pastry competition. Chef Bodrogi, an experienced competitor and pastry chef instructor at the Art Institute of Atlanta, was eager to get started.
ypically, competitions place restrictions on the use of silicone molds in...

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Rolling With Success
By Michael Joy
Pastry Art & Design: April/May 2007

How to make your own textured rolling pin.
Sometimes, to stand out in the crowd, you have to make your own equipment. A select few chefs take naturally to this, while others believe they either do not have the time, or access to special construction tools or materials. In this demonstration, we will show you how a small amount of silicone, a sheet of textured wall paper and a trip to your local hardware store can result in a highly versatile textured rolling pin. Since the rolling pin’s surface is silicone, it is ideal for adding texture to your chocolate, fondant, sugar, bread dough, pastillage and even marzipan. Because the rolling pins are not for sale, the only way to get one is to ...

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Versatile Artistry
Creating free-form shapes with Silicone Noodles™.
By Stéphane Tréand & Michael Joy
Pastry's Best Magazine: May 2007

A few weeks ago, I caught up with Chef Tréand while he was teaching a sugar casting class at the Maui Community College (MCC) in Kahului, Maui. MCC pastry instructor, Teresa Shurilla, has hosted several prominent guest chefs including; Stanton Ho, Ewald Notter, Jacquy Pfeiffer and Drew Shotts, at their new seventeen-million dollar state-of-the art culinary academy, built by the University of Hawaii.

While in Maui, I couldn’t help but notice the irony of visiting a place where so much sugar is grown and processed, yet the high humidity ...

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Amenity On Demand
By Stéphane Tréand & Michael Joy
Pastry's Best Magazine: Nov. 2006

Recently, I visited Chef Stéphane Treand to photograph him working on a variety of showpieces. During the photo shoot, I had to repeatedly ask him to slow down. His movements were so quick, it was difficult to get clean shots. Realizing my requests weren’t flagging his life long habits of speed and efficiency, I asked him, “What’s French for ‘slow down’?” Soon after, ‘Dus mo’ became the phrase for the day. To Stéphane, fast is his normal pace. It wasn’t until he saw the photo outtakes with him either half in or half out of the picture frame or doing too many things at once, that he gave an understanding laugh.


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When he needed sugar and pastillage replicas of a Venetian mask to use as decorations for a party, Alexandre Bourdeaux, the pastry chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago, contacted Michael Joy. … In a process only recently applied pastry, the chef used the mold to create the masks in a fraction of the time that it would have taken by hand. "With silicone molds," Mr. Joy said, "a skilled pastry chef can alter, transform or combine any number of objects to create a wildly original and edible structure."

Joy has worked on such diverse buildings as the Frank Lloyd Wright's Winslow home in River Forest, the Playboy Mansion restoration, and other properties in the Gold Coast. Among them are the Mayfair Regency, the Belmont Cinema façade and the Mentor building. He has worked on some the terra cotta features on buildings throughout the city, though work on higher altitudes is "not his favorite pastime". ... His unquestioned artistic skills have been applied in several different areas of the arts and all of them seem somehow to revert back to his basic skills as a mold maker.

"...The first class on my schedule was one of the ones I was most looking forward to, a class on silicone mold making, which was taught by master mold maker, Michael Joy. What is so interesting about Michael is that he is able to adapt his craft to the confectionery field, and to provide pastry chefs with an innovative way to create shapes and objects using a new medium. Michael demonstrated the equipment and the products necessary to create silicone molds, both food grade and non-food grade, as well as master molds. Pastry chefs were on hand to demonstrate the different techniques, uses and versatility of the molds...."
(Link to Pastry Art & Design)

… Somehow this all fits together because Michael Joy is all about molds. He makes them, from "trophies to prosthetics," from sculptures to molds for food. And he lives with them, breaking and rebuilding them, and inventing new ones. … "Pastry chefs are multi-media-skilled people who are bumping into limitations in the medium …" Its noticing the unnoticed that Michael brings cooks joy: By helping them to see the world in terms of its architecture, using the architecture to design molds and improving their work using those molds."
(behind the scenes at the photoshoot)

Creative sparks flew when Michael Joy, mold-maker extraordinaire, met Jacquy Pfeiffer, co-owner of the Chicago-based French Pastry School. Pfeiffer and partner Sebastien Canonne had seen the elaborate molds that Joy made for a chocolatier, and were convinced the technique had enormous potential for pastry chefs. … Joy an artist whose medium is silicone, and Pfeiffer, an artist whose medium is sugar and chocolate, had no trouble communicating - and even less trouble understanding how each of their talents complemented the other. "Molds give pastry chefs the tools they need to work as a 'found object' sculptor," Joy continues, "Paper, wood, glass… the list of possibilities is virtually endless. Even a flimsy piece of paper sculpture can be stabilized and preserved if it's used as the model for a mold."

When the Oscars needed to spruce up their time-honored award in the mid 90's, folks called Michael Joy. And when the French Pastry School in Chicago was looking to up the ante on its elegant creations, it got Michael Joy on the horn. Believe it or not, we're talking about the same guy. Boasting a career that spans from architectural restoration, model making and sculptural fabrication to mold making and casting - not to mention teaching - Art Institute educated Michael Joy decidedly has his hands full. "What ties my interests together, from commercial to pastry to restoration, is an interest in providing a bridge between industry and art," Joy said. "I want people to recognize mold-making as a valid tool to create art."