One Boniato, Two Boniato
Resourcefulness and serendipity led Michelle Collins to take a sweet staple of the South, the sweet potato pie, and turn it into something completely different – and delicious.
"I’m not a baker!” insists Michelle Collins. Her fans might disagree. The owner of Chelle’s Cutie Pies, her new South Florida business has already gotten noticed by Oprah and savvy locals in plant-based and gluten-free circles.
Like many food artisans, Collins, 37, arrived at her new profession after a roundabout journey that started in the Caribbean. Her mother is from Antigua and her father is from Jamaica. Born in Brooklyn, Collins grew up in Antigua, where she learned to love the island’s farm-to-table cuisine.
“Fresh fruits, mango trees, black pineapple – the sweetest pineapple,” she recalls. “A lot of fish, conch, shrimp, lobster. You know your fisherman.” Other Antiguan dishes include fungee, like polenta, rolled into a ball and served with codfish or sausage, and ducana, a tamale-like dish made of pumpkin and coconut rolled up in banana leaves. “Every island has a variation of ducana,” she says. Her aunt would cook it over a coal pot.
In school, Collins took home economics, “something I liked,” she says. But her path was to be in hotel management – travel, hotels and tourism are the main industry in Antigua. After high school, she relocated to the United States and got her degree in hospitality management at the University of Central Florida. From there, she worked in corporate America, at properties in Times Square, Melbourne Beach and finally Miami. She went back to school and got her MBA from the Chapman School of Business at FIU, then took some time off to plan her next move.
Tasty Mistake
It was a year ago on Christmas that Collins planned to bake a sweet potato casserole for a visiting friend, whose daughter ate a vegan and gluten-free diet because of celiac disease. Here, she discovered her serendipitous mistake. When she cut into a sweet potato, she discovered its inside was white, not orange. She’d accidentally bought boniato (Ipomoea batatas), also known as Cuban or Japanese sweet potato, which is starchier, drier and nuttier in taste than the orange-fleshed variety. Collins mashed it, added cinnamon but no egg or milk and the result was “incredible,” she says. “I wonder if I could turn it into a pie?”
The next day, she worked up a business plan. In January, on a consulting job for two hotels in Austin, Texas, she mentioned her pie idea to executive chef D. Colbert. He let her use the kitchen to work on her recipe. “I’d work by day as sales manager, then came back to bake,” she says. To gauge public response, she signed up for a major event, Vegan Chill, – the reviews for her pies were great – and the hotel GM asked about the pies for their grab-and-go market. “To sample?” Collins asked. “No, to carry here for dessert – Austin is a big vegan city.”
Just as she was pondering her move to Austin and continuing her new sideline, COVID-19 hit, shutting down businesses across the country and forcing many to ask the question she was pondering herself: “What do I do now?” Collins decided to spend her time on her fledgling business, now called Chelle’s Cutie Pies, with a tagline “Taste Like Christmas.” Back in Miami, she worked on developing new flavors for wholesale sales and finding mentors to help her get up to speed on the food business. “People have been very generous,” she says. Grown’s Shannon Allen was someone who listened to her struggles of entrepreneurship. “It’s total strangers who push you. Friends are scared for you.”
Time to Sell
Collins found five retail partners to carry her mini tarts and full-sized pies – The Plantisserie, Beehive Juice Bar, Green Gables Cafe, Lilikoi Organic Living and Love Life Cafe. “The crazy thing is that I never met anyone face to face because of COVID,” she says. In the early summer, she started selling her mini tarts at the Saturday Coconut Grove organic farmers market, especially popular with vegans. In August, she sold out for the first time.
In late summer, she got an email from Oprah’s team in search of items for the popular television host’s Favorite Things of 2020 feature. Collins sent samples and went through the process. She wasn’t selected, and also realized her new business wasn’t ready for the volume of sales such recognition might mean. Still operating as a cottage industry, Chelle’s Cutie Pies needed to be made in a commercial kitchen to reach the next level.
And that’s Collins’ goal for 2021: find a commercial kitchen so she can ramp up production, build her retail business and set out to market her products on a bigger scale. One year ago before the pandemic, armed with her new MBA, she may not have envisioned herself peeling boniato and promoting her creamy plant-based confections at farmers markets every Saturday. But she’s happy with her decision. “COVID ended up being a blessing in disguise,” she says. “It allowed me to do this. I have resilience and grit I didn’t think I possess. And learning to adapt – that’s part of the journey.”
Making It Taste Like Christmas All Year Long
The traditional sweet potato pie occupies a beloved space on many tables. Considered pumpkin pie’s Southern cousin, this rich dessert, typically made from recipes handed down from aunts and grandmas, uses mashed sweet potatoes, evaporated milk, butter, sugar, eggs, cinnamon, ginger and perhaps cloves. Variations incorporate brown butter, orange zest and pecans. Patti LaBelle’s recipe calls for a flaky crust made with butter-flavored Crisco. The elegant version made by James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dolester Miles, of Birmingham, Alabama’s Highlands Bar and Grill, is topped with creamy bourbon whipped cream.
To create her sweet potato pie that’s vegan and gluten-free, Michelle Collins had to change the usual flour-based crust to a graham cracker version, revamp the custard filling and, of course, create a recipe using boniato. Every week, she bakes mini pies and full-sized pies for her market and customers, making crusts on Wednesdays and baking on Thursday and Fridays. For the filling, she peels, cuts into chunks and boils the boniato, processes them until they’re smooth, then adds sweeteners and flavorings. Once the crusts are filled, the completed pies are packaged, ready for Friday delivery. All her pies and tarts use boniato as the base. Island Girl Pie is infused with coconut milk and grated coconut. Potentially Sweet Dreams uses vegan cream cheese and almond milk. Sweet Serendipity is sugar-free, especially for diabetics. Spirited Island Girl Pie adds dark Myers’s Rum and a pecan streusel sprinkled with nutmeg and cinnamon.
Chelle’s Cutie Pies
Mini tarts start at $4 and whole pies are $35-45. Order online or buy at the Coconut Grove organic farmers market on Saturdays; Beehive Juice Bar on Bird Road; Love Life Cafe in Wynwood; Green Gables Cafe in Coral Gables; The Plantisserie in Little River; and Lilikoi Organic Living in South Beach.
