Meet the Baker Behind Tallahassee’s Piebrary

You know what pairs well with a good book? A good piece of pie. I find the first chapter of “Moby Dick” becomes even more profound accompanied by a slice of apple pie. Plenty of bookstores have coffee counters and cozy chairs, tempting customers to park themselves with a cup of Joe and a bestseller. But only Midtown Reader, Tallahassee’s coolest (and not just in my humble opinion) bookstore, has the Piebrary, where you can get a slice of Turtle pie or Key lime pie or one of the other varieties that circulate weekly. It’s all sourced from a patisserie created by beloved Tallahassee baker, Jennifer Young. 

I’m a decent baker and will put my pumpkin pie—my great-grandmother’s recipe—up against anybody’s, but I am here to tell you Young’s TC Bakery, which stands for Tailored Confections, beats anything coming out of my oven: white chocolate pistachio cake, caramel cake, cakes with rainbow layers, Oreo cheesecake, strawberry shortcake cheesecake, peach cobbler cheesecake. TC does 40 kinds of cake, 40 kinds of cheesecake and, per Young’s estimates, 40 kinds of pie. I haven’t even touched on the cupcakes, muffins and cinnamon rolls—which ain’t your mama’s cinnamon rolls and come in iterations such as lemon blueberry and sweet potato. TC Bakery proclaims itself “Simple, Southern and Always Southside.” For those who aren’t familiar with Tallahassee, Southside is a historically Black neighborhood. It’s the hilly home of Florida A&M University (FAMU), as well as businesses established back during the Jim Crow era. “For me,” Young says, “Southside represents family. Southside is love.”

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Diane Roberts Shares Her Family’s Recipe for Seminole Pumpkin Pie

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Old-School Flavor

Startups always face challenges. Young says she struggles with getting the capital she needs to expand. But with Young as chief baking officer and her sister Renee Williams running the business side of things, TC Bakery has become a Tallahassee mainstay. You can get slices of cake and cheesecake at her shop on South Monroe Street, as well as Piggly Wiggly and IGA grocery store locations from Tallahassee to Panama City to Carrabelle and various towns in South Georgia, several coffee shops and the Tallahassee International Airport.

Young is big on old-school flavors, especially sweet potato and banana pudding. She makes banana pudding everything: cheesecake, cinnamon rolls and actual banana pudding. She says banana pudding “reminds people of their roots.”

That’s no lie. When I tasted Young’s banana pudding cheesecake, a vivacious take on the most Southern of desserts, I was powerfully reminded of my grandmother’s own version. Granny Roberts was a fabulous dessert maker, always serving at least three at Sunday dinner, and all of them, except for the cherry Jell-O tapioca mold—which looked like a case of the measles—were delicious. But the favorite, the one my cousins and I would fight over (and by fight, I mean the occasional hair-pulling), was the banana pudding. TC Bakery’s creation captures the Nilla-wafered, egg-rich, banana-laced custard of my childhood.

Young grew up in the culinary business. Her parents ran Ma Mary’s Kitchen, a legendary restaurant next to FAMU. After they died, she revived the place and ran it until the COVID-19 pandemic wrecked in-person dining. After her twin daughters were born in 2016, Young suffered from serious postpartum depression. So she started baking. “I needed a way to soothe the anxiety and sadness,” she says. “I could go bake a cake or a pie and everything would be better.” Young used her grandmother’s recipe books, tweaking and modifying along the way. After all, food is family. Young says she has felt her mother in the kitchen. Her father, too. She says, “I pray while I stir. It’s my peace.”

I could go bake a cake or a pie and everything would be better. I pray while I stir. It’s my peace.
—Jennifer Young

Pie Fundamentalists

I’ve never had to struggle with postpartum depression, but I can attest to the therapeutic properties of baking. My mother died four years ago, just before Thanksgiving. I didn’t care whether we had turkey and dressing, but I wanted to make her desserts: sour cream pound cake, apple crisp and pumpkin pie. As I chopped pecans, whipped butter and rolled out dough, the warm scents of cloves, brown sugar and caramelized pumpkin flesh conjured up my mother in ways pictures or objects could not. This was especially true of the pumpkin pie. We have always been pumpkin pie fundamentalists. The biggest rule: no canned pumpkin. Whenever some unwise person ventured it was more “convenient” to use Libby’s, my mother would roll her eyes. “That’s pitiful,” she’d say. “Get yourself a Seminole pumpkin and roast the thing. So easy the cat can do it.”

Seminole pumpkins are a Florida heirloom variety. They’re usually pale buff in color and the taste and texture is as far above those neon orange things from the grocery store, as vintage Veuve Clicquot is above Bud Light. It’s sweet and nutty, with flavors that deepen when combined with eggs, milk and spices. As I mixed the ingredients, I half-expected to hear my mother say, “Make sure you grate the nutmeg really fine now.”

Back at Midtown Reader’s Piebrary, the Key lime and the sweet potato were sold out, but the Biscoff cookie butter pie called and I answered. I sat down with a stack of books I thought I might buy: “Is a River Alive?” by the nature writer Robert Macfarlane, Percival Everett’s novel “James” and a mighty doorstop of a book called “Baking in the American South.” The recipes (and the photographs) were alarmingly seductive. I shut the cookbook; who was I kidding? I’ll keep my pumpkin pie, but I wouldn’t be trying to make lemon icebox pie or warm chocolate meringue pie, not when I can get something even better on the Southside from TC Bakery.

I opened “James” and, with a bite of Biscoff cookie butter pie perched on the end of my fork, started reading: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them plain as day, though it was deep night ….”  

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Find more of Roberts’s Capital Dame columns here.

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