A little café in Riwaka is flying the area’s flag in the Bakels Supreme Pie Awards.
The annual Bakels Awards, reportedly the largest event for New Zealand bakers, offers 11 categories and a combined $18,000 in prize money.
Café owner Toni Marshall faced a dilemma choosing which flavour to enter — her customers’ favourites include jalapeño steak and blue cheese, venison, peppered steak and cheese, and roast veggie and cashew, elevated with the Hurry Curry spice mix from Motueka local Kalpana Laitflang’s Mixed Roots range.
Toni eventually settled on the creamy green-lipped mussel pie, made to her own recipe, because she believes “no one else will be able to match that flavour”.
The secret to her pies is that everything is made from scratch. Meat is slow-cooked for at least eight hours – “we have that many crockpots going every day!” she laughs – and she does not use gelatine as a thickener.
“Because we don’t have the set-up for a commercial kitchen, everything is literally handmade with love.”
That love results in solid sales. The café goes through plenty of sausage rolls and pies in a day – up to 300 pies in summertime, in fact.
Toni took over the business about three years ago, and diversified to help ride out the tumultuous economy. Mrs Smiths does packed lunches for several tourism companies, creates custom birthday cakes, and coordinates at least a couple of large catering jobs each week.
While speaking to The Guardian, an order for sugar paste peonies arrives to adorn an upcoming wedding cake, and Toni mentions that the following morning, she is due to wake up at 4am to make 140 bacon and egg ‘McMuffins’. It’s this sort of variety that she loves about the job.
“I never get bored. The constant challenge as well – I’ve always got a million missions on.”
She is quick to credit her 17 staff members for keeping the systems flowing smoothly, saying, “I don’t do any of this by myself.”
The area’s best Bakels result to date is a gold medal in the “Café Boutique” category, awarded to Riwaka’s Ginger Dynamite (now Little Dynamite) in 2016 for its smoked warehou and tarakihi pie.
Toni has had several customers tell her she should enter, and so she is finally doing so as an homage to them, and to see if she can whip up another win for the Top of the South.
