Kathy Leew's handmade pies sure to please

Kathy Leew is an electrical engineer by day, pie baker by night. If you pop by theHillhurst-Sunnyside Farmers' Market this fall, you'll find her manning her own table,piled high with pies and tarts of all sizes, sharing her love of pastry with Calgarians.

"Hillhurst-Sunnyside is a great market for open-minded customers," she saidof thepopular community market, which has recently expanded to be open Saturdays aswell as Wednesdays. "I found my people. They're great for coming back and givingme feedback perfect for the test drive."

Kathy has been baking since she was a kid. "I'm entirely self-taught," she said. "MyMom worked at Fuddruckers,where they had a bakery, and she'd bring homecookies at the end of the day. I used them as a prototype to try to come up with myown. We weren't allowed to have a lot of sweets, but I became self-obsessed withbaking."

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She evolved to pie around the time the Internet came about, researching recipes andtechniques online after school. "Imade hundreds of pies in high school anduniversity," she said. "It became my outlet a way to escape from doingmath."

Her job as an engineer with a local utility provider gives her the flexibility to takeWednesday afternoons off to do the market. She started a small baking businesswith a friend a couple years ago, which gave them both a taste of the bakerybusiness, but has since decided to go solo.

"Sometimes it's lonely, but you have totalcreative control of your vision it's all on you," she saidof the 20 or so pies shemakes each week, which feature local, seasonal ingredients with her own culinarytwists, like Saskatoon-blackberry- lavender, blueberry-balsamic, and apple pie witha cheddar crust inspired by her dad.

"I try to put twists on almost everything I do it's hard to compete with the classics. I don't have a recipe from my grandma I'mthe first generation pie baker, so I make them the way I know how."

After much tweaking, Kathy settled on a pastry made with about 80per centbutter, 20 per centshortening for the best texture and flavour. She makes all the pastry by hand, insmall batches, and plays with the fillings from week to week.

"I've always likedexperimenting, and I'm inspired by travel I love other cities and small towns thathave awesome bakeries and things that are accessible and different," she says. Oneof her biggest sources of inspiration has been the Four and Twenty Blackbirds pieshop in Brooklyn, where they bake whole pies, hand pies, and sell pie by the slice.

"Pie is so accessible so homey, so welcoming and yet people are intimidated bymaking it," she said. "It's considered too labour intensive."

For Kathy, it's her creative outlet; for late summer, she's brainstorming a peach piewith fresh herbs, perhaps basil, and is already looking forward to pears with saltedcaramel in the fall.

"People are sometimes tentative about trying new things, butthey're more apt to try a smaller pie with a unique flavour, and then sometimes theycome back for a bigger one."

She has been trying to come up with a name for her tinybakery since December a tricky endeavor and so it remains the pie shop with noname. But that's OK as long as there's pie.

When the Hillhurst-Sunnyside market closes for the season, she hopes to get out toother markets in the fall, perhaps Market Collective or theInglewood Night Market, withher modern bake sale concept.

"I really like the one-on-one interaction with people," she said. "My ultimate dream is to open a pie caf. Do different seasonal combinations. We have tons of fruit in the province. In Calgary there are so many great cupcake shops and French bakeries there's room in the middle for something accessible and not too fussy."

And there's always room to bring something new and delicious to the table.