Tammy Mason, owner and baker for Sweetie Pies in Gulf Shores has been satisfying the sweet tooth of locals and tourists for twenty years, and she has no intention of slacking off any time soon.

Mason opened her first bakery in Foley in 1990 and moved to her Gulf Shores location a little over a year ago.

When she opened in Foley, her offerings were minimal. “I think our pie selection at that time was probably four different kinds,” Mason recalls, but now she makes at least twenty different kinds of pie every day. Mason’s staple pie has always been the pecan pie, but she has expanded that line to include some unique offerings. She now makes a white chocolate pecan pie, a chocolate pecan pie, a sugar free pecan pie and her own special concoction, a tropical pecan pie with pineapple and coconut.

Mason enjoyed working in Foley for nineteen years but moving to Gulf Shores was the right move for her business. She said that 1998-2001 were her peak years, but after 9-11 in 2001the economy took a nose dive, and then Ivan in 2004 and Katrina in 2005 really hit this area hard. “We never really saw a comeback from 2001-2008. It was a matter of making a decision, locals were still supporting us, but tourists and snowbirds were no longer coming to the center of town where we were so we decided to situate ourselves back where they were.”

Even now, considering the oil spill, Mason still thinks that moving to Gulf Shores was a good move, and she is still close enough that her regular local customers from Foley can come as well. Mason said that a lot of her old customers have trekked down to her new location. “We still have a lot of our regular customers. In Foley we had very limited hours. When we came down here we were expected to be open seven days. Those hours have made us available, so if you live in Foley and you were a customer you may not be able to come see me for lunches during the week, but you can get down here on the weekend.”

It took Mason a while to decide to move. After she made her decision, she said that when the day came for her to actually move, “my heart was pounding in my chest, second guessing, have I done the right thing? But we knew that we had the reputation of nineteen years to pull with us and that it was going to work.

The location that she is in now became open and was offered to her, and she felt like she had to seize the opportunity. “It is not going to be often that a prime spot like this becomes available, so that was a major factor in sealing the deal.”

Sweetie Pies grew in popularity right after the move, but has seen a decrease in customers this summer. Sweetie Pies first day in Gulf Shores there was standing room only inside, “just like flashbacks to the old days,” siad Mason. She also gets a lot of business from people going to the movies.

“I think that a lot of people think that we just disappeared.” Mason worries, but she hopes to spread the word so that all of her old customers can find her again.

The snowbirds had no problem finding their new location though. Mason said that the snowbirds “were thrilled to find that we had situated ourselves down here where they had easy access to us, so our snowbird season last year was just phenomenal.” If you ask Mason how she got into the baking business, she will tell you that baking has always been a part of her life. “I have a little bit of history, my grandmother on my mother’s side did all of the baking for the local snack bar and the local hospital when I was a little girl. Her name was Madora, known to a lot of family and friends as “pie-dora” because that is what she did. She was known for her pies.” She always says that she must have gotten her baking gene from her maternal grandmother.

Mason said that she always dreamed of bringing a bakery back to the area. After she graduated college, she had a few marketing jobs, but then decided to take the plunge and open her own business. A while later, Sweetie Pies was born.

“When I decided to open the bakery, I wanted to focus on a certain product, and being that pecans are native to this area and pies are something that I really love doing I decided to focus on the pie line with the emphasis being on the pecan pies” said Mason.

Focusing on pies has equaled twenty years of satisfied customers, and Mason has also racked up quite a few awards for her goods. She has received national recognition for her pecan pies, and Southern Living magazine dubbed her pies one of the best pecan pies in Alabama. Sweetie Pies has also been listed as one of the “must see” places to go when visiting the Gulf Coast.

Many of Mason’s recipes were perfected by members of her family before her. Her pecan recipe was a pie that her mother was known for that she has carried on, “so she gets credit for the basic pie.” A lot of her other pies are pretty close to the ones that her grandmother made, “with little tweaks here and there” to make them her own.

Running a bakery may seem like a sweet deal, but Mason reports to the kitchen between 5:30 and 6 a.m. seven days a week. She usually does not get out of the kitchen until around 11 a.m. Right now she is the only baker, but she had an assistant earlier this year that she had to let go because of the declining number of tourists to the area.

Mason is used to the long hours though and said that her customers expect her to be in the kitchen 24/7 when they come by. “It is rare that I take too much time off, most of the time you will find me in the kitchen, and i think that is what people expect too.”

People are amazed that Mason does all of the baking everyday by herself, but she says that she has it down to a routine now and “could probably walk in blindfolded and start my daily routine.” If she has extra help in the kitchen, she can get a little confused because she has gotten so used to doing it alone.

The daily menu at Sweetie Pies varies slightly, but pies and an assortment of cookies, scones and muffins are always available. For an average day, Mason makes between 20 and 30 pies which can be bought by the slice or as a whole. On her more hectic days, like the day before Thanksgiving which happens to be the biggest pie day of the year twenty years running, Mason has made as many as 800 pies.

Mason tries to use the freshest ingredients she can get her hands on, so some of her delectable concoctions are only available seasonally. Mason said that “there is no telling what I will be making. I do an array of items whether they are on our regular bakery list or not. We always tell people, just ask. If I can find a recipe for it I can usually make it.”

This summer, for an example, a customer from Arizona could not believe that she did not make an apple pie with an ingredient that gave it a little kick, jalapeno peppers. Mason was intrigued and decided to play around with her standard apple pie recipe. The resulting pie had her customers “going nuts.” Mason said that her customers expected the pie to be available every day this summer.

Mason likes to experiment with different combinations of ingredients as well. “We have fun with certain products, it is a fun process. That is the whole art of baking is being able to experiment and trying to come up with some new things. I’ll try anything. If you have got something weird, bring it. I’ll try it. see if we can make something out of it.”

Mason loves what she does everyday, saying that if she did not like it, she would have been in trouble after doing it for twenty years. Her favorite pie to eat is the chess pie, but her favorite pies to make are her meringue pies. She tries to get the meringue as high as she can and customers over the years have called them “works of art.”

Mason does not even mind her customers trying to pass her work off as their own. She said “we have some sneaky people out there. I have had people who bring me their pie plates, and they’ll say I want to order an apple pie, but can you put it in my pie plate? I don’t mind doing that.”

Mason will keep supplying sweets and baked goods for as long as she can. Years from now, she will probably still be found in the bakery’s kitchen every morning, making her works of art. Even though her son has shown interest in learning her trade, Mason is not sure that she could ever turn over the reigns.

“This is what I do. The day I stop being in the kitchen will be the day that Sweetie Pies exists no more because this is where I want to be.”