The Bay Area’s ‘Pinay Pie Lady’ Is Back, Just in Time for Thanksgiving

Two years ago, Melody Lorenzo, aka the Bay Area’s “Pinay Pie Lady,” put on what she thought was going to be her last holiday pie sale. It was the culmination of years of creative tinkering at her bakery, Sweet Condesa, which took classic Filipino desserts like halo-halo, bibingka and queso de bola, and recast them into the format of an all-American pie.

The pies were wildly popular. But at the time, Lorenzo’s lease on her commercial kitchen was set to expire in a few months, and she was, quite frankly, burned out after seven years of fighting to keep her business afloat.

“I was trying to take care of myself,” Lorenzo says. “Ever since the pandemic, I’d been on a hustle mode — like, I don’t shut off, basically.”

Lorenzo shut Sweet Condesa down officially last summer and stepped away from baking altogether for a year. Still, the desire to create never left her. She’d walk to her neighborhood farmers market, and people would recognize her as “Sweet Condesa” and tell her how much they’d enjoyed her desserts.

“I know I made an impact,” she says.

She started thinking whether there might be a way she could start her business up again, but in a smaller-scale, more sustainable way.

So, just in time for Thanksgiving, Lorenzo has relaunched her business as “Homebaked by Sweet Condesa,” a bakery that she runs out of her home kitchen in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood. To start out, she’ll sell her Filipino baked treats, like guava bars and ube pie-chunk cookies at pop-ups held once or twice a month, mostly at Ballast Coffee, a Filipino-owned coffee shop in West Portal.

And yes, of course, she will be selling Thanksgiving pies.

“I wanted it to be more fun again — no expectations, no sales goals,” Lorenzo says. “I just want to share my creations again with the community, not feel forced to keep going because I need to make X amount of money to afford my overhead.”

Because of the restrictions on cottage food businesses like hers, Lorenzo is in the process of reworking many of her most popular desserts to make them shelf-stable — so, no more custard-based calamansi or halo-halo pies for now. But the limitations haven’t deterred Lorenzo from her original mission to incorporate traditional Filipino flavors into her dessert repertoire.

For Thanksgiving, she’s reworked one of her popular pie recipes — her peach mango cobbler pie ($65 for a nine-inch pie) — and created another new pie from scratch. The former, of course, is a play on a Filipino fast-food classic: Jollibee’s signature peach mango hand pie, which was Lorenzo’s go-to when she was growing up in the Philippines. Her version features home-made peach-mango jam, a graham cracker crust and a streusel topping for extra crunch. It’s particularly delicious served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, Lorenzo says.

The new pie, a maple pili nut pie ($80), is Lorenzo’s Filipino twist on pecan pie. It’s similarly caramelized and gooey, but instead of pecans, she uses pili nuts — a slender, creamy nut with a macadamia-like texture that’s indigenous to the Philippines.

Candied pili nuts are a popular snack on the islands. “I wanted to recreate that into a pie that has a similar flavor,” Lorenzo explains.

Both pies are egg-free — another concession to cottage food regulations, but also a boon for folks with egg allergies.

In addition to the pies, Lorenzo is also selling a third Thanksgiving dessert, a dulce de leche bibingka cornbread ($55) — which, as its name implies, is a cross between American cornbread and the traditional Filipino coconut rice cake known as bibingka.

All of Sweet Condesa’s Thanksgiving treats are available for online preorder starting at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 4. And since Lorenzo is just baking out of her home kitchen now, supplies will be even more limited than in the past: She expects she’ll only be able to bake a total of 40 or 50 pies this year. But if all goes well, she might be able to increase her output for Christmas pie season, by which time she hopes to have found a way to rework that calamansi pie.

“I’m just trying to make it work so I can offer [my pies] again,” she says. “The people who found out are just super excited.”

Homebaked by Sweet Condesa’s Thanksgiving desserts are available for online pre-order, starting at 2 p.m. on November 4. Pickup options are on Wednesday, Nov. 26, 10 a.m.–noon at Ballast Coffee (329 W. Portal Ave., San Francisco), and 3–5 p.m. at Mestiza (214 Townsend St., San Francisco). Supplies are very limited.

Sweet Condesa’s next Ballast Coffee pop-ups will be Nov. 15 and Nov. 22, 11 a.m.–1 p.m.