Looking for something to celebrate this week? Well, look no further than National Pecan Pie Day on Wednesday, July 12! We’re celebrating this day with a special promotion – any visitors who buy our new drink The Memory Maker (a pecan pie latte) will also receive 10% off the purchase of a Pecan Pie.
We’ve focused a lot on this sweet treat for the past few years at Three Brothers Bakery, and I wanted to share the full story about our Pecan Pie today.
In summer 2010, an intern for Country Living magazine named Sarah called our bakery because she was looking for the best mail-order pies America had to offer. Bobby was the one who answered the phone and assumed it was just a college kid trying to get free pies. But a “discussion” (those who are married know what this means) ensued. You have to learn to pick your battles, so I gave up on trying to get Bobby to make and ship the pies. I knew it really was from Country Living because I recognized the area code and prefix from my time living in NYC.
So, one hot summer day, I walked into the production area and saw four gorgeous pies sitting out on the table. We didn’t regularly make pies then, so I asked why they were there. Bobby replied, “Well, you told me I had to make the pies, so I made the pies.” I kept my mouth shut and just smiled. The Pecan Pie we make is distinct in two ways: we use our Hamantaschen dough rather than the typical flaky crust, and it’s non-dairy.
We mailed the pies off to Country Living magazine and forgot about the whole thing. Then a month later, a photographer called and said were named the best mail order pecan pie in the country. She was asking for more pies because they needed to take pictures – I, of course, wondered why they couldn’t take the pictures before they ate them! We sent more pies.
They also said we had to have an online store if we were to be published. Well, a couple of weeks before that call someone had entered our website and online store and took it down. (The moral of the story is never give anyone root access to your website.) It took me a year to get that online store up and running, and the previous one took a year as well. When they told me we had to have an online store on a Thursday, I said, “No problem – I’ll have one up and running on Monday.” And I am proud to say I did it. Okay, that Monday it had one product, pecan pie, but we had an online store and fulfilled their requirements!
This wound up being my first foray into really pitching our bakery out to the national media, and it also led to the year-round production of pies here. We’ve kept innovating it, from our famously decadent Pumpecapple Piecake to the Fudge Pecan Pie and even our Deep Dish Pecan Pie! We ended up on the Food Network’s Outrageous Foods because of the Pumpecapple Piecake, which only happened because of the Country Living accolade that came about because of that wonderful intern, Sarah.
We’re also excited to offer our Pecan Pie Cheesecake in store this summer for a limited time to celebrate National Pecan Pie Day! We don’t carry it all the time in the bakery. If you try it and are craving more, you can end a wonderful dinner at Cavatore’s with our pecan pie cheesecake. They also have the best food, and their Caesar salad is quite a production – plus, they have great live music.
Pecan Pie Cheesecake
And we’re not done yet! This summer, we’re excited to introduce two new coffee beverages that play on our award-winning Pecan Pie. The first, as we’ve already mentioned, is a new Pecan Pie Latte. We’re calling it “The Memory Maker” since, after all, we are memory makers who happen to be bakers.
But if this Houston heat doesn’t exactly make you want to reach for a warm coffee, we cannot blame you. We also have a colder option, the Golden Pecan Frappe, that will keep you cool.
Golden Pecan Frappe