Kathy Leew is an electrical engineer by day, pie baker by night. If you pop by the Hillhurst-Sunnyside Farmers' Market this fall, you'll find her manning her own table, piled high with pies and tarts of all sizes, sharing her love of pastry with Calgarians.

"Hillhurst-Sunnyside is a great market for open-minded customers," she said of the popular community market, which has recently expanded to be open Saturdays as well as Wednesdays. "I found my people. They're great for coming back and giving me feedback — perfect for the test drive."

Kathy has been baking since she was a kid. "I'm entirely self-taught," she said. "My Mom worked at Fuddruckers, where they had a bakery, and she'd bring home cookies at the end of the day. I used them as a prototype to try to come up with my own. We weren't allowed to have a lot of sweets, but I became self-obsessed with baking."

She evolved to pie around the time the Internet came about, researching recipes and techniques online after school. "I made hundreds of pies in high school and university," she said. "It became my outlet — a way to escape from doing math."

Her job as an engineer with a local utility provider gives her the flexibility to take Wednesday afternoons off to do the market. She started a small baking business with a friend a couple years ago, which gave them both a taste of the bakery business, but has since decided to go solo.

"Sometimes it's lonely, but you have total creative control of your vision — it's all on you," she said of the 20 or so pies she makes each week, which feature local, seasonal ingredients with her own culinary twists, like Saskatoon-blackberry- lavender, blueberry-balsamic, and apple pie with a cheddar crust inspired by her dad.

"I try to put twists on almost everything I do — it's hard to compete with the classics. I don't have a recipe from my grandma — I'm the first generation pie baker, so I make them the way I know how."

After much tweaking, Kathy settled on a pastry made with about 80 per cent butter, 20 per cent shortening for the best texture and flavour. She makes all the pastry by hand, in small batches, and plays with the fillings from week to week.

"I've always liked experimenting, and I'm inspired by travel — I love other cities and small towns that have awesome bakeries and things that are accessible and different," she says. One of her biggest sources of inspiration has been the Four and Twenty Blackbirds pie shop in Brooklyn, where they bake whole pies, hand pies, and sell pie by the slice.

"Pie is so accessible — so homey, so welcoming — and yet people are intimidated by making it," she said. "It's considered too labour intensive."

For Kathy, it's her creative outlet; for late summer, she's brainstorming a peach pie with fresh herbs, perhaps basil, and is already looking forward to pears with salted caramel in the fall.

"People are sometimes tentative about trying new things, but they're more apt to try a smaller pie with a unique flavour, and then sometimes they come back for a bigger one."

She has been trying to come up with a name for her tiny bakery since December — a tricky endeavor — and so it remains the pie shop with no name. But that's OK — as long as there's pie.

When the Hillhurst-Sunnyside market closes for the season, she hopes to get out to other markets in the fall, perhaps Market Collective or the Inglewood Night Market, with her modern bake sale concept.

"I really like the one-on-one interaction with people," she said. "My ultimate dream is to open a pie café. Do different seasonal combinations. We have tons of fruit in the province. In Calgary there are so many great cupcake shops and French bakeries — there's room in the middle for something accessible and not too fussy."

And there's always room to bring something new and delicious to the table.