Linda Hundt - Sweetie-licious Pies: Eat Pie, Love Life

Family traditions create special childhood memories that help to influence, guide, and sustain us all through our lives. Gathering together for the pleasure of sharing a great meal with one another and enjoying family recipes are things that we in our family cherish and still continue. We baked a lot of pies back then and still dopie has always been our favorite dessert!

My daughter Linda loved to cook at an early age. She is a graduate of Michigan State University, but took a circuitous route to follow her dream and mission of loving people, creating excellent food, baking unbelievably wonderful pies, and honoring traditions.

Lindas charming and nostalgic shop, Sweetie-licious Bakery Caf, in DeWitt, Michigan, is a walk back in time to a bakery of yesteryear. I truly love to visit and eat her cooking. She uses many old family recipes and often creates her own new pie varieties, which are works of art. You too will love her cooking. This beautiful cookbook contains her recipes, ones that I know youll treasure and love to share with your family and friends, just as we do with ours.

Love to you all,

Joan McComb

I believe a successful and blessed life is one that has been earned, learned, and loved. This cookbook is all about my family and friends and their stories. Ive come to learn how living and baking an honorable life made their lives richer and, dare I say, sweeter. This has certainly been true for me. Most of them did not lead glamorous or wealthy lives. They were simple people who believed in faith, love, loyalty, and hard work. Their success was in how they made everybody who touched their lives feel loved through their cooking and baking talents. We too can emulate their giving nature, by making and eating good pie with those we love!

It is no surprise to anyone who knows me that my Easy-Bake Oven was my favorite Christmas gift. I speak of it often, as it inspired my love for baking and creating at an early age. I remember my twin sister and me as six-year-olds, tearing off the Christmas wrap, exposing the box with a picture of a darling little girl playing with her oven. I loved her hair (which I later imitated), her dress, and that she was baking with her own little oven! I was so thankful to Santa for thinking of me.

After that my memories are mostly scattered. I remember that my sister and I baked for my brothers and how much they seemed to like me when the Easy-Bake was out. I remember all five of us kids hovering around the oven while taking impatient turns staring into the tiny window, watching our brownies bake beautifully under the hundred-watt lightbulb. Our mother cut the brownies into five pieces so we could all get a taste. We were happy despite the small portion, because wed made it!

Unfortunately, my beloved Easy-Bake was destroyed in a house fire at my parents home over twenty years ago. My dear husband, well aware of my fondness for my beloved little oven, decided to find me a replica of my own on eBaya glorious surprise for me one Christmas morning. As I peeled the Christmas paper off my gift and saw the little girl on the box that I hadnt seen in forty years, all the joy and love Id felt from cooking and baking throughout my life came rushing back. I realized that my mission in life, my dream of changing the world one pie at a time and loving people through my food, all started from that little oven. Through my darkest moments, cooking and baking soothed me and gave me a purpose.

I know that my gifts, my blessings, my mission, and my love will always fill my life. Sharing the traditions of our foremothers, and our shared passion for homemade food and the provenance of pies, is my vocation, my lifes sweet mission.

As the 2011 Crisco 100 Year Anniversary Innovation Award winner, Crisco National Pie Best of Show $5,000 winner, Food Network Pie Challenge winner, holder of sixteen first-place Crisco National Pie ribbons, owner of the nationally known Sweetie-licious Bakery Caf, and thousands and thousands of homemade pies later, I want to share what I have learned. What better way than through this unique cookbook?

I am elated to share with you my recipes, the people who inspired me through their food and lovely way of life, and the legacies they left for us all to aspire to.

xoxo

Linda Hundt