Photos: Penguins On The Beach! (Well, Ice Penguins, Courtesy Of Kingsborough Students)

Commuters might bemoan this week’s chilly weather, but students of Kingsborough Community College’s culinary arts program took it as an opportunity to hit the beach and chisel some ice.

We went down to the school (2001 Oriental Boulevard) yesterday to pick up some papers at Community Board 15’s office – which, by the way, is temporarily without phone or internet service – and had the good luck of running into Chef Thomas Smyth, one of the head professors with their culinary arts program.

Smyth told us the 16 students of his cold-kitchen class spent four hours on the beach, chiseling away at the giant blocks of ice. Smyth himself wielded the chainsaw to bring the blocks down to size, and the blocks were sculpted into a penguin, a whale and two items that the students jokingly described as ashtrays.

“They get a survey of everything they could do in a cold kitchen,” including creating these decorations, Smyth said.

It’s the first time Smyth and the culinary arts program have been able to do ice sculptures at the school, since the ice supply has been an ongoing problem.

“Actually, this is the first year we managed to get the bloody ice,” Smyth said. “Just to get somebody to deliver a couple of blocks of ice to Kingsborough was a big deal, but now we’ve got that figured out.”

Next year, we demand the class make an ice sculpture of a Sheepshead fish. You hear me, Smyth?