A life of pie
B.C. woman bakes works of art, hopes to create a new industry
Jessica Clark-Bojin remembers at one time having a reputation for her lack of cooking skills.
“I couldn’t crack an egg. I was shooed out at family gatherings,” says the Vancouver native, laughing. “I had no experience in a kitchen whatsoever.”
Now Clark-Bojin is shaking up the baking world with her elaborate pie creations, which range from detailed celebrity portraits to towering three-dimensional “pie-scrapers.”
The former filmmaker’s journey from kitchen klutz to pastry pro started with a New Year’s resolution to cut down on sugar in 2016, when she began experimenting with pies to sate her dessert cravings. What began as a creative foray has become a full-time gig.
“It’s the most fun job that I’ve ever had in my life,” she said. “I never thought I’d be doing anything like this.”
Clark-Bojin’s multi-tiered masterpieces include Calvin and Hobbes riding a wagon down a hillside and an Aladdin-themed castle. The self-described science fiction nerd has also concocted a glow-in-the-dark Tron apple pie and Star Wars themed fruit turnovers shaped like Jabba the Hut.
Along the way, Clark-Bojin has tapped into her science background as a former university physics student to develop new methods and materials. Her innovations include colouring pastry dough, creating pigments that glow in the dark and baking three-dimensional shapes.
“This isn’t cooking. This is chemistry!”
The American talk show The Chew invited Clark-Bojin to New York to present a pie on the show in late 2016, which was followed by an invitation from the Food Network to start making videos
for the cooking channel, she said.
Pies are especially challenging because pastry dough quickly becomes tough when overworked and its inconsistency means it often changes shape unpredictably in the oven, ClarkBojin said.
She said one “aha moment” came while designing an alien face from the sci-fi franchise “Predator,” when Clark-Bojin came up with a method of blending different layers of pastry together, “like modeling clay,” using an egg mixture.