Starting from Scratch
Down a meandering country road in Eastern Ontario, you can find Stacy Blair’s homestead and the backdrop for her Instagram-turned-home-based business. Set on more than 100 acres in Westport, and true to its history, but enhanced by modern touches and recent renovations, her home is surrounded by greenery and wildflowers — and decades of ancestral memories and experiences.
Inside, Blair, along with her husband Scott, and their five children, Olive, nine; Henry, six; Penny, four; and twins, Harvey and Archie, one, spend much of their time in the kitchen, nurturing a burgeoning relationship with food preparation. “In comparison to me, it’s something that began at a really young age for all my kids,” Blair explains.
You see, Blair, a self-taught baker, food photographer and the self-proclaimed foodie-meets-nerd behind The Pie Bar, a small-batch bakery that provides modern baked goods, didn't always have an unconditional love for flour, butter and sugar.
A structural engineer by trade, Blair spent much of her career focusing on heritage and restoration projects across Canada, including Parliament Hill. She was never a baker. In fact, she was wary of baking anything at all, until she was nearly 28 years old and on maternity leave with her first child in 2013.
“I took up baking mainly because my husband was begging for baked goods everyday,” she says, adding that she reluctantly turned the oven on and started baking cookies, muffins and one- layer cakes. “To my surprise, I completely fell in love with every stage of the process.”
And so, with baby Olive cradled in one arm, Blair balanced a spatula and camera with the other, as she set out to chronicle her newfound baking adventures online, as a keepsake for her growing family. She started with Instagram, and as her popularity on that platform blossomed, she launched a blog — 27thandolive.com — aptly named after her daughter.
“She gets all the glory. She was our first baby, and without her, I don’t think any of this would have happened. I settled on a name that sounded like a street interaction to symbolize the change in direction my life took after she arrived.”
Little hands and big names
The first recipe Blair shared online was for a braided apple loaf. “I was quite inexperienced and honestly, I have no idea why I chose that specific recipe,” Blair says, laughing as she recounts the early days of her foray into food blogging. “Likely, I thought it looked challenging — and anything with yeast in it seemed challenging to me back then.”
Over time, and with each tinkering of a new batch, Blair discovered her photographic style, curating a feed that started to capture attention and gain traction with followers. With her pared-back-pallet of fresh, yet homey country whites, Blair began to showcase not only her baking, but the little hands of her daughter.
On a snowy morning in January of 2015, Blair remembers waking up to a persistent buzzing on her cell phone — she had been featured as a suggested user on Instagram. “I went from 10,000 followers, to more than 100,000 followers overnight,” Blair says, as she explains what motivated her to blog. “All of a sudden, people were looking for my recipes and insight into our life in an old farmhouse in the country.”
Olive’s little hands clearly made a big impression.
“My photos with Olive were what set me apart from many other foodie accounts and blogs at the time,” Blair says with a sense of motherly pride. “That spring, my Blueberry Dutch Baby in a cast iron skillet was featured by my idol, Martha Stewart.”
A reluctant pie baker
These days, Blair is most notably recognized online and at local markets for her decadently sweet and savoury pies, but The Pie Bar is much more than just pie. It’s sourdough and croissants, cruffins and tarts and extra large cookies, all offered in a cornucopia of mouth-watering varieties. Her flavours range from spice pumpkin chocolate chip and nutty peanut butter, to maple pecan and cranberry shortbread, and even a twist on a classic double chocolate, with added pistachios.
But, it was pie, and once again, her husband, who nudged Blair to take the next step in her digital-baking journey.
“Pie is my numero uno,” Blair says, as she lights up with the thought of how far she’s come. “It's my bread and butter, my steak and potatoes, my peanut butter and jam — although, it wasn’t always.”
Her husband already knew how to make pie, having worked in Westport’s Church Street Bakery during high school. “So, when he would randomly get up to bake a pie on Sundays, I thought I’d won the lottery. Why would I attempt to learn when I could rely on him?”
But, eventually, Blair did learn to bake pie. Lots and lots and lots of pies.
She started with a standard apple pie and then moved on to a blueberry pie, concentrating on, as she explains, her reverence for nostalgia.
She taught herself to braid crust and weave a lattice.
As her confidence in her techniques grew, she began to experiment with pairing ingredients, such as honey and lavender, raspberry and cardamom, raspberry and verbena, strawberry, lemon and basil as well as a chocolate-bottom lemon pie.
Blair continued to bake so many pies, that she became known as the “bringer of pies” to family and friends’ gatherings and it was then, while on her second maternity leave with her son Henry, she realized that she was ready to take her baking out into the real world and try to sell her creations.
She registered to be a vendor at the local Christmas Market in Westport, and decided on a new name and a logo to accompany her baked goods.
“I decided on The Pie Bar, made stickers, cards and branding, and slapped on a $15 price tag on a whole pie,” Blairs explains, telling us about the new name and how she didn’t know much about selling, or calculating costs, or even setting up for a market. “But, I knew if I didn’t do it, I would never do it, so I took the leap.”
Grateful for community
As a mother of five young children, Blair has her hands full, quite literally. Last year, in the crunch of fulfilling holiday orders for her Christmas Cookie Boxes, Blair gave birth to twin boys four weeks early. She went quiet on social media for a few days, only to reappear with words of appreciation for friends and family who pitched in, and stepped up, to support her small business.
From the outside, Blair makes everything she does look seamless: being a professional, a blogger, a photographer, a baker, an entrepreneur, a mother and a partner.
“Almost daily, someone tells me what a superhero mom I am, or asks how I am able to do it all,” Blair says with a shrug. “It’s easy to depict a beautiful, perfect life online, but that isn’t necessarily reality. The truth is, it definitely has not been as simple as people may think it has. It is a lot of hard work — for our entire family. People don’t see the weeks worth of laundry I’ve been putting off, or the dirty floor or the disastrous toy room.”
In fact, it's the secrets behind even the most choreographed facades that are often the sweetest and most unexpected of all.
Blair shares with us how Instagram and her blog quickly became connection points for other young mothers trying to find their way.
“Typically, when we become parents, we lose our sense of self and independence,” she says, explaining how her digital content transformed from solely pictures and words, to a community of like-minded individuals not only learning about mixing and measuring, but also about being new to parenthood.
It’s no surprise how closely Blair holds her community to her heart. She gains much of the inspiration for her baking and her bakery from the people she loves, especially her own family and their life’s journeys and adventures living in a small town and on a multi-generational stone farmhouse.
“I think [the homestead] has definitely inspired me to learn over the years,” she says, picking up her grandmother’s measuring spoons and her husband’s great-great grandmother’s rolling pin, to infuse each recipe with the remembered voices of the past, together with her deep sense of connection and gratitude.
“The kitchen in our house has definitely changed over a hundred years, but I always try to imagine what these walls have witnessed through the generations, and what family dinners have looked like over the last century.”
Indeed, the walls of her kitchen have witnessed so much, particularly since the preparation for her very first local market, that Blair and her husband converted an old driveshed on their property into a commercial kitchen to better accommodate the increasing demands on her bakery.
“It’s my own magical spot. A place — pre-COVID — where I could invite neighbours and customers in to sip coffee, eat pastry and just watch the world go by. But now, as things have slowed down in terms of in-person services, and we look to the future, and or next steps, I realize I went from feeling so hopeless at the beginning of the pandemic, to being overwhelmingly thankful that time helped me to discover the beauty and possibilities that our homestead continues to offer.”
In the spring of 2021, what started out as a passion project to digitally capture and share special memories with her daughter, flourished into a great new love, and yet another new business.
“We set up our sugar shack in the garage next to my bakery,” she says, noting that their first year of collecting and boiling proved bountiful. “If anything, the pandemic has shown us that anything is possible, and the resources are right at our fingertips.”
The Pie Bar
9277 County Rd. 42, Westport, Ont.
the-pie-bar.com | 613.453.2647 | @the_pie_bar
