6 minute read
EATafrica
EATafrica Premier pastries Delivered to your doorstep
The Nigerian love of a meat pie is well known but online venture The Pastry Corner Bakery is opening up Lagosians to an unchartered variety of sweet and savoury treats – all freshly baked and beautifully boxed for next-day delivery. Mark Edwards speaks to co-founder Natalie Okotie-Eboh.
‘‘L ooking back on my life I can’t recall a moment when food wasn’t part of it,” says Natalie Okotie-Eboh. “My mother owned a restaurant and I would watch with intrigue how her meals and pastries had the ability to magically put a smile on anyone’s face. I started cooking at a very early age, enjoying experimenting with spices and herbs to create a very unique taste. Aged nine or 10, I would grind different spices with a grinding stone rather than a spice grinder because I wanted to make my pepper soup taste more traditional and local.”
With food as her lifelong “soulmate”, as she puts it, it was no surprise that the English literature graduate would carve a career in cooking and one that retains the family connection and her scrupulousness in sourcing and using the best ingredients.
The 28-year-old is the head chef and, along with her two sisters, the co-founder of the Pastry Corner Bakery, an online venture in Lagos that provides customers with mouth-watering gourmet pastries delivered to their door. Lucky Lagosians can choose from a regularly updated range of cakes, cookies, toasted sandwiches, pies and breads.
“We bake everything in house. Our customers are able to order from 10am to 8am the following day and have freshly made pastries delivered to them within 12 hours,” says Okotie-Eboh.
“We have a policy in our kitchen ‘nothing stale, everything fresh’. We bake all our customers’ orders fresh. Nothing is carried over to the next day. We start baking by 5am mainly because most of our pastries are prepped a day before to make the next day easy for us.”
The food looks as good as it tastes – check out The Pastry Corner Bakery’s Facebook page for a host of gooey, oozing
22 SISTER ACT Natalie Okotieeboh (centre) with Hillary and Anne-Marie
SWEET TREATS Cookies to choose from
FRESH AND FILLING Hot patties and sandwiches
examples – and it is beautifully packaged for delivery. Unboxing has been made an experience to savour and is an example of the care Okotie-Eboh has put into the business.
Pastry education
Since the initial culinary mentoring by her mother, Okotie-Eboh has honed her own skills over time. She loved all cooking, but pastries always held a special appeal. She soon realised there was more to learn than life in Warri could teach her so moved to the megacity of Lagos.
“I knew for a fact that there was more to the art of pastries than I understood,” she says. “I craved the knowledge so learned all I could from the internet. I knew within me that in order to feed my craving of knowledge I needed to move from my small town to the hustle and bustle of Lagos.
“I researched the top pastry chefs in Lagos and applied to work as an intern for Chef Alex Oke at his XO Bakery. Through him I learnt about, saw and tasted pastries I had never heard of or seen in my life.
“I worked and saw how a bakery was operated. I felt like a child in a candy shop. I was hungry for more knowledge so I downloaded more books and read all I could on the art of pastries. You see, pastry is more than a dessert we eat to me, it’s an art that goes through a process of creativity.”
All that learning and creativity has gone into the Pastry Corner Bakery, which was launched in December 2018, with Okotie-Eboh letting her imagination run riot on the menu.
“I believe that new creations are born through experimentation so I just love playing around different elements,” she says. “Last year, we created a pie made with ripe plantain, chunks of beef and Guinness. The result was super delicious. We are currently planning on increasing the size of our Guinness Pie to a large pot pie so our customers can have enough of the filling.”
Another recent quirky addition to the menu are Junk Cookies, which are loaded with coco pops, cornflakes, oatmeal, chocolate chips, Oreo cookie pieces and, most bizarrely of all, potato chips.
When the business began it was the sisters baking everything on their own. Okotie-Eboh remembers: “We would bake more than five cakes overnight. I would fall sleep in a chair in my kitchen with a rolling pin in hand and my mum would have to wake me up.”
That situation couldn’t continue, especially with the demand spiralling for the premier pastries. Now the three sisters have been joined by another trio of talented women.
Family business
“My sisters are partners,” says Okotie-Eboh. “Hilary is in charge of customer service and photography while Ann Marie runs the logistics of the company. We now have a marketing manager, Temisan. She is in charge of bringing in the money and promoting the business while Bemi and Sandra are our
We would bake more than five cakes overnight. I would fall asleep in a chair with a rolling pin in my hand.
The help is welcome as The Pastry Corner Bakery is far from the sisters’ only project. In September last year they also launched Dora’s Food and Spices (DFS), which freshly prepares ready meals to give busy households a stress-free delicious meal at the end of the day. September launch. A Brekki Box, containing a cooked brunch delivered every Saturday, is also in the pipeline.
Whatever Okotie-Eboh’s future plans, food is sure to be a part of them.
For more information, visit The Pastry Corner Bakery Facebook page.
Okotie-Eboh is very excited about the sisters’ latest venture, a blog and YouTube channel called The White Sisters, which will launch this year and document the buzzing food, fashion and beauty scene in Lagos.
There is also plenty in store in the new year for the Pastry Corner Bakery with projects including the chance for customers to subscribe to the regular delivery of Baking Boxes, which are filled with the ingredients and recipe card to make one of Okotie-Eboh’s amazing cakes at home. “We wanted to introduce exciting and fun ways for families and novices to bake those beautiful creation they see on social media,” she says. The scheme is on course for a
Valentine’s pastries to fall in love with
The Pastry Corner Bakery team are right now hard at work in their kitchen working on their Valentine’s Pastry Box. ‘It will cost N 6,000 (US$ 16.55) as we want it to be very affordable for our customers,” says Okotie-eboh. “It will feature a new addition to the menu called the Smore Brownie Pie,” she adds.
Bestseller
A favourite of Okotie-Eboh’s as well as many of her customers are the bakery’s fudge brownies. “They are made with locally sourced cocoa and chocolate. One of the reasons our brownie is so popular among our customers is because the brownie is packed with fudge at the centre and it’s chewy and gooey all at once. Plus it’s filled with locally made chocolate chips for an extra chocolate punch!”
