When blogger Alisun “Sunny” Hernandez puts on her decorated hoodie, she takes on a new role: a pie delivery fairy.

“You never know when the pie fairy is going to show up,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez prepared about 100 heart-shaped pies for Valentine’s Day in 2011. “It was a baking marathon,” she said, explaining that rolling out the dough for all of them made her arms sore.

She delivered the pies to friends all around Syracuse and campus while wearing her hoodie, which is decorated with the name of her blog, “For Your Pies Only,” and the words “Pie Fairy” on the front. She had fun surprising people and making their days.

“People are rarely unhappy when they get free pie,” she said jokingly.

When Hernandez isn’t in her Pie Fairy costume, her love for baking and social media come together and inspire her posts on “For Your Pies Only.”

She started the blog while she was unemployed in January 2011 to keep thinking creatively and to share recipes she works on with other pie enthusiasts, she said.

The blog has inadvertently opened up a lot of doors for Hernandez. She met her direct supervisor at Project Advance, a partnership between Syracuse University and local high schools, during a food blogger luncheon. Hernandez would not have been invited to the luncheon without the pie blog, she said.

Hernandez is now social media manager at Project Advance, though she also works full-time at Syracuse.com. She described Project Advance as a program in which high school teachers and SU professors collaborate, and high school seniors can take SU courses along with their high school curriculum. Hernandez works on Project Advance’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Sometimes she includes stories with the recipes or writes about her inspiration for them. Her recipes range from traditional to more out there, she said. She tells her friends if they can dream up a flavor, she can try to make it happen.

Some include a “Samoa pie,” which emulates the Girl Scout cookie, and a “Saint Patrick’s Day Pub pie.”

Kim Brown, Hernandez’s friend and the assistant director of alumni programs in Career Services, had never had anything besides a “normal pie,” Brown said, until Hernandez told her they were making a chicken almond pie one night.

Depending on the occasion, Hernandez makes sweet and savory pies in different shapes and sizes. She has used special tins to make mini pies. For Pi day, she made a pie in the shape of the mathematical symbol, Brown said.

Brown is an adjunct multimedia professor and avid social media user, and met Hernandez through Twitter. She said Hernandez uses social media well to grow interest and promote herself.

“If you’re getting the attention from people from Pillsbury, you know you’re doing something right,” Brown said.

Hernandez’s social media skills are translated to the blog. She has a Facebook page, Twitter account and Instagram to spread her pie-loving message. She said she uses Instagram as a tease; she posts photos as she’s baking to let people know something new is coming up in the blog.

“It generates a little bit of excitement,” she said.

Tracy Tillapaugh, a career consultant at Career Services and a friend of Hernandez, thinks the message of her blog is that pie doesn’t have to be boring.

“You think a pie has to be a regular nine-inch pie plate, but it doesn’t have to be,” Tillapaugh said.

In addition to recipes, Hernandez’s blog also has pie-related comics, videos and links. One post has a link to a debate over whether cake or pie is better. Hernandez plants herself firmly on the pie side. Although she admitted she does like cake, she prefers pies because they are more versatile.

“I’ve made dinners where you have pie for dinner and you have pie for dessert,” Hernandez said. “I think you can do so many more things with pie than you can do with cake.”

She also enjoys that pies can be appropriate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, since they come in both sweet and savory flavors.

Hernandez had a few blogs before “For Your Pies Only,” but she said they weren’t specific enough. Her blog is different in that she has some personal anecdotes and also something useful in it, she said. Hernandez said when it comes to both blogging and baking, you have to have fun, both for your readers and for yourself.

Baking has always been a part of Hernandez’s life. As a child she helped her mother, grandmother and aunts bake.

When it comes to her favorite pie, she said hers was rhubarb custard.

“A lot of people like strawberry rhubarb; I’m a little bit of a rhubarb purest,” Hernandez said. It reminds her of her grandmother who made rhubarb upside-down cake with the rhubarb from her garden.

Hernandez doesn’t sell her pies, but instead focuses her time on experimenting with recipes.

Said Hernandez: “Who knows, maybe a pie shop or selling my pies is somewhere down the road, but as of right now I’m just baking and blogging.”

Published on November 28, 2012 at 12:06 am

Contact Lizzie: echart@syr.edu