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ITHACA, NY (CortacaToday) – Let me introduce you to woman-owned wonder Pies and Pinups. Pies and Pinups is a local business started by Bethany Dixon. Here are a few things to know about Pies and Pinups’ Bethany Dixon before you get started:
• She attended Ithaca College and graduated in 2010.
• She’s a pianist, enjoys writing poetry, and is a mostly self-taught baker.
• Her cakes are topped and decorated with edible flowers. They come bursting with flavor. Her favorite as of late is the “Sonatine,” which is an earl gray cake with milk-chocolate ganache, brown buttercream, passion fruit and apricot jam.
• She sources her flowers locally from The Marigold Gardens, Dirt Baby Farm, and Plenty of Posies.
• She was featured in Better Homes and Gardens’ 2023 article, “Edible Flowers are Having a Moment—Here’s What to Know About the Trend.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Grace Condon: When did you start baking?
Bethany Dixon: I have loved baking pretty much my whole life. I think it runs in the family a bit. I’m actually up in Maine right now, and it’s funny my grandmother still lives in the same house that her great grandmother lived in, who was famous for making a pie every single day of her life. Which I do not claim to do but I think I grew up around a lot of really amazing cooks, and had always been curious about baking, but I never started doing it professionally until a couple of years after college. I started working at Sarah’s Patisserie, which used to be this amazing French pastry shop in Ithaca with an owner who is classically trained in French pastry … I started just working at the counter, but eventually, when one of her pastry chefs left, she let me start learning with her.
GC: When did you decide to turn baking into a business?
BD: In 2017, I heard about a commercial kitchen space that was available to rent, and I decided I would just try doing that along with my full-time job. I work at Cornell [University] during the day … [I’ve] been able to balance creating the beautiful things I love, and also not having to worry too much about relying on them for my only source of income.
GC: What is the most popular item on your menu?
BD: Well, I think the macarons are probably the most popular … They’re these like small little French cookies that are made with an almond meringue shell, and then the middle is an Italian meringue buttercream. So they’re gluten free by nature, but they’re also just like very beautiful … But they’re fun, because I can make so many different flavor combinations … I do a macaron CSA share every month where people can sign up for a box of a dozen [macarons] [with] four different flavors … This year, especially, I’ve noticed that people have been ordering a ton of cakes.
GC: Where did the idea “Pies and Pinups” come from?
BD: I lived in London for a year studying piano … and London was way ahead of the U.S. at that point in the vintage scene. It was common for there to be all these beautiful, really affordable vintage shops, sort of interesting little markets [and] old-fashioned speakeasy places … I just thought it would be really fun to have that that marriage of the retro style, the beautiful vintage and delicious pies.
GC: Where do you source your ingredients from and how much of it is local?
BD: Eggs, flour, butter, as many vegetables and fruits as I can, are from local farms in Tompkins County. There’s a local mill, Farmer Ground Flour, so I can use flour from the region. For fruit, I really love Stick and Stone and Black Diamond. Perry City Orchard grows a type of fig tree that can survive this climate. They have the most incredible figs and fig leaves which I’m obsessed with using, and the owners are the sweetest humans. For eggs, I really love Sabol’s Farms as well as Autumn Harvest Farms. My favorite place to get local honey, which I use a lot in macarons is a place called Bright Raven and they have a store called the Honeybee Embassy. And for vegetables, Stick and Stone and Plowbreak Farm.
GC: Do you have culinary training or are you self-taught?
BD: It was mostly at that patisserie. A majority of what I do now is a lot more experimental in the flavors that I use, and what I really love, is working with unusual botanical and herbal combinations, both in the ingredients and as decorations. What I do now is using that sort of scaffolding of the more traditional pastry training and read a ton. I read cookbooks like novels. So yeah, I don’t have any formal pastry training.
GC: What’s your business philosophy?
BD: I will be the first to admit that I do not have the brain of a business person. I think I have the brain of an artist. So, my business philosophy is the same as my general philosophy about creating, which is I want to create an experience where someone can take a moment out of the whirlwind of daily life and just fully experience their senses—be completely in the experience of tasting something and feeling the emotions that come with that … I don’t think that necessarily means that I will ever be a millionaire from macarons, but that’s okay.
GC: How would you describe your style of decorating? Where did you develop your interests?
BD: Whimsical. When I think about that word, I think about truly what it means in terms of trusting your instincts and your whims, for me, in terms of beauty or aesthetics … I really wanted to make my cakes look as close to a garden as possible with edible flowers … I had seen a really wonderful French blogger, Mimi Thorisson, she made something called a summer garden cake which was just like a simple sort of cake with billows of whipped cream on top and blackberries and roses and pansies and violets, and all these things sort of like exploding on top of it as decoration. That was the first cake I saw where I was like, oh my, I can just use flowers.
GC: Were there any flowers that you were surprised to know are edible?
BD: I was really surprised that peonies were edible. And I always try to say to people like, they’re edible in the sense that they’re not poisonous, but they’re not necessarily delicious like you don’t necessarily want just chomp on them. And, also, snap dragons. And magnolia is also. Some of them taste like nothing, and some like magnolias, which kind of tastes like cinnamon and cardamom, have a really beautiful flavor. For the most part, I expect people to remove all the flowers before they chomp down on cake.
GC: Can you explain the reasoning behind offering a pastry share? Typically you see the subscription model used for farms and what they offer seasonally.
BD: I had just been thinking about a sustainable way to experiment with new recipes and flavors, so that I could keep trying new things and sharing them with customers … Then that will give me a lot of flexibility within the seasons within what I’m inspired by to try new things and build a regular customer base of people who are really up for trying new flavors and giving me feedback. I think a large number of my CSA customers are the same ones I started out within 2017, which is pretty fun—seven years of regulars.
GC: Do you have a favorite pastry to bake?
BD: There are two that come to mind. So one is a cake that’s on my menu called a Sonatine and it’s an earl gray cake with milk-chocolate ganache, brown buttercream, passion fruit and apricot jam. That one’s a combination of some of my favorite flavors that I spent a long time trying to figure out how they could all harmonize together. And the other is a bergamot and espresso macaron, which was actually based on a drink I had in New York City twenty years ago that was an espresso shot with bergamot foam …. That’s just how my brain works, I’ll try a flavor and hang onto it like a rat terrier for years.
GC: How do you come up with flavor combinations?
BD: I keep my recipe notebook by my bed, because I’ll often wake up like in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning, and be like, Oh, my God! I have a cake like I know what this cake is.
GC: Where are your pastries sold?
BD: I did just start selling my macarons at the Wide Awake Bakery storefront [in Ithaca] …. My friend, is the owner of a cafe on campus at Cornell, called Temple of Zeus. I sell my macarons there, too.
GC: Does being located in Tompkins County, among the Ithaca community benefit your business in any way?
BD: One thing I love about the ability to be in Tompkins County and work in a sort of forward-facing job like that is that you just really get to know people so well as regulars … But I think the biggest benefit is just the network of how many creative people there are and how they’re creative, not just in what they make, but also in the ways they approach having a business, whether it’s a food truck or a pop up or like a farm with a beautiful harvest dinner once a season. Honestly, the amount of really beautiful local ingredients, whether they’re fruits or vegetables, or flowers, or honey or wine, I feel like it’s really possible to work with so much of the local supply.
GC: Lastly, what are your favorite spots in Ithaca?
BD: They mostly all have to do with interesting things to eat or drink and bookstores. So, Buffalo Street Books [and] the Odyssey Bookstore. I love Angry Mom Records as well. In terms of restaurants and bars, I really love Cafe Dewitt. The Rook and Argos have my favorite cocktails in town. And the Hazelnut Kitchen and Creekside Cafe in Trumansburg are both incredible.