The origin story behind LiLLiPiES Bakery’s new children’s book, “Pie For My Birthday,” is a sweet serving of spending time with loved ones and, quite fittingly for a Princeton institution known for its signature small-batch treats, one of “motherhood and apple pie.”
Drawing directly from owner Jen Carson’s experiences baking with her young children, the 32-page title was officially released in December last year and features illustrations by former LiLLiPiES front-of-house supervisor Sofia Schreiber.
Located at 301 North Harrison Street in the Princeton Shopping Center, LiLLiPiES Bakery is best known for its “LiLLiPiES,” or individually portioned pies. Over the years, these classic three-inch confections have grown along with Carson’s business, which remains committed to baking everything in-house from scratch using locally sourced ingredients like fresh fruit, honey, and eggs from partnering farms.
LiLLiPiES also specializes in seasonal varieties that change monthly, as well as sourdough breads, cookies, brownies, tarts, bars, baking mixes and kits, and all-day breakfast and lunch items. But another constant, beyond this boundless creativity, is Carson’s desire to share the family-forward tales at the heart of every treat — the birthday parties, the special occasions, and the overall joys of giving children their first baking experiences — that make memories last a lifetime.
“I was inspired to write ‘Pie For My Birthday’ when I noticed all of the young families at the bakery. I remembered those fun but frazzled days when we had young children. Although our ‘kids’ are now 25, 22, and 19, those days are very fond memories,” Carson says in a press release about the book.
“Pie For My Birthday” is the second self-published collaboration between Carson and Schreiber, both Princeton residents, following “The LiLLiPiES Cookbook” in 2020. Carson’s first title offered a behind-the-scenes look at more than 100 recipes for LiLLiPiES favorites, such as sourdough English muffins, baked cake donuts, and frozen “hot chocolate.”
Schreiber’s ink drawings depict various baking techniques used throughout the cookbook, complemented by photographs taken by Chiara Goldenstern, both of whom were Princeton High School students at the time of publication.
In her biography, Schreiber, who worked at LiLLiPiES from 2018 to 2021, remarks that Carson “supported her artistic endeavors from the very beginning, from decorating signs when she worked at the bakery in high school to creating graphics for ‘The LiLLiPiES Cookbook.’” Schreiber is a sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD, where she is studying for her bachelor’s of fine arts in illustration with a concentration in literary arts and studies.
“LiLLiPiES has been a huge part of my artistic journey, I started working there in high school,” Schreiber adds. “Jen always encouraged my love for illustration by allowing me to design signage and merch and even graphics for the beautiful ‘LiLLiPiES Cookbook.’ When she asked me to work on this project with her, I was over the moon!”
Schreiber drew the illustrations for “Pie For My Birthday” over the summer of 2023 using graphite and gouache, an opaque watercolor painting method. But this time, she was also able to learn more about the production process, taking a hands-on approach to creating the book alongside her longtime mentor, Carson, who affectionately refers to Schreiber as “her favorite illustrator and artist” in the biography section.
Schreiber, who graduated from Princeton High School in 2021, has also created the digital illustration for the cover of the Princeton Adult School’s course catalog two years in a row. Her most recent design for the spring 2024 edition recognizes the 85th anniversary of the institution, which has offered educational courses and lectures since 1939. For more, see Schreiber’s portfolio website at sofiaschreiber.com.
“Pie For My Birthday” takes readers through the invention of the very first LiLLiPiE, wrapping it in a story about baking with young children while offering helpful advice on how to make the most of the activity together, including several recipes for chocolate cake donuts, sweet and salty chocolate chunk cookies, brownies, and apple-blueberry LiLLiPiES.
Aimed at ages three to eight, the book is available at the physical store and on the LiLLiPiES website for $22, including shipping, at lillipies.com.
Carson dedicated “Pie For My Birthday” to her husband Ken, her “now adult” children, James, Sean, and Sara, as well as her mom, Angel Colello, whom she credited as a major inspiration and helped pass on her pie-making prowess to Carson.
The story of the book follows Carson and her three young children when her oldest son, Sean, said he wanted to bring in a birthday treat for his kindergarten class the next day. This had to be, according to the teacher’s rule, both “single-serving and easy to eat,” as Carson says in the introduction of the cookbook.
Sean requested pie — not the easily transportable and individually portioned donuts, cookies, brownies, or cupcakes that Carson had in mind — leading her to conjure up a series of individually portioned “little” pies using her mother’s recipe for apple pie in a standard muffin tin, each of them approximately two inches in diameter.
In “Pie For My Birthday,” the whole family, including Ken, then goes shopping for ingredients, stopping at the grocery store and Terhune Orchards in Princeton, one of LiLLiPiES’ longtime sources of local fruit, for a day of apple picking in the idyllic farmlands.
Back at the house, the pie-making process begins, with each of the steps accompanied by Schreiber’s diagrams showcasing the journey from dough to streusel to filling. The book’s narrative ends with the in-classroom birthday celebration featuring a victorious Sean, surrounded by equally pleased students and their LiLLiPiES.
In her cookbook introduction, Carson says that the same day she invented the LiLLiPiE, a friend recruited her to bake once a week for her company. When the office workers loved the samples as much as Sean’s kindergarten class, Carson gave the mini-pies their iconic name.
According to Carson, the name “LiLLiPiES” was the result of a “family brainstorming session” in which, after looking up the word “little” in other languages, they settled on the Danish word “lille.” The sound rolled off the tongue with each repetition, and from that came “lilli.”
“Lilli,” as mentioned in a 2021 Princeton Magazine article by Wendy Greenberg, also reminded them of the tiny inhabitants, or “Lilliputians,” of the island nation of “Lilliput” mentioned in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel “Gulliver’s Travels.” (That name originates from its Irish townland of inspiration, “Nure,” now commonly referred to as “Lilliput.”)
Growing up in a Belleville multigenerational Italian household full of talented cooks and a grandfather who ran a butcher shop with his brothers in Newark, Carson followed the recommendations of her relatives to steer away from owning a business or entering the food industry and began her career as a teacher.
Carson’s family then moved to Westwood, where her father also became a business owner, running his own travel agency, according to the introduction provided in “The LiLLiPiES Cookbook.”
Carson originally thought of pursuing music until studying elementary education and mathematics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where she also held a food service job at the college’s snack bar. After she graduated, she taught for six years in Massachusetts.
Yet when she and her husband Ken, a chemist who currently works for the Boston-based pharmaceutical and biotechnology company HotSpot Therapeutics, had kids of their own, Jen Carson returned to her love of baking with newfound vigor, bringing what might have been a “pie in the sky” passion project to life.
As Sean’s first birthday approached, Carson says, she realized she wanted to continue the handmade tradition of a freshly baked, personally decorated cake that her mother had started during her own childhood. After taking a fateful cake-decorating class and getting “hooked,” the introduction continues, Carson’s desire to bake for her loved ones naturally evolved into a future business model.
“Part of motherhood to me was baking for and with our kids,” she says in a quote.
Before opening LiLLiPiES in 2016, Carson, a self-taught baker, ran Jen’s Cakes & Pastries, which she operated out of the Wooden Spoon Catering Company, a co-operative commercial kitchen rented by several small businesses in Montgomery’s Princeton North Shopping Center.
Carson formed an LLC and began sharing a space at the Wooden Spoon, referencing the management and business electives she had taken at Bucknell. She graduated to selling at local farmers’ markets in Princeton and West Windsor, as well as wholesale to Small World Coffee, whose Rocky Hill roastery now supplies the extensive coffee menu offered at LiLLiPiES.
To further develop her concept for the business, Carson decided to pursue a degree in restaurant management at the French Culinary Institute in New York, now known as the International Culinary Center. She envisioned a retail bakery and coffee shop focused on both hospitality and connection, a “community gathering place” that prided itself on an unwavering devotion to decadent treats.
Before Carson could make those aspirations a reality, she was asked to be the bakery manager of Hopewell’s Brick Farm Market — which downsized in October 2023 and will now operate in a smaller capacity on the campus of the owners’ fine dining farm-to-table restaurant, the Brick Farm Tavern — and Carson decided to dissolve Jen’s Cakes & Pastries.
But after years of delays, Carson amicably left that role and found her way again by consulting for Princeton’s Small World Coffee, regaining her culinary confidence through a strong bond with owner Jessica Durrie, who had been “her first wholesale customer.” When Carson felt ready to open her own business, Durrie’s continued support set the stage for a fresh start.
After a first and second storefront location for LiLLiPiES “fell through,” Carson explains, she “had almost given up” before signing a lease at the Princeton Shopping Center in 2015, taking over the 2,000 square feet space formerly occupied by children’s clothing boutique “Incredible Me!” LiLLiPiES opened as a retail bakery and coffee shop in July 2016.
Among many awards, Carson was featured in Food Network’s 2015 list of “Great Pies from Coast to Coast,” won the 2018 Garden State Culinary Arts Award for “Outstanding Pastry Chef/Baker,” and led LiLLiPiES to success as one of NJ Monthly’s “Best Bakeries.” She has also served as an instructor for the Mercer County Community College culinary and pastry arts program on and off for over a decade, where she currently teaches a course on artisanal bread.
LiLLiPiES has since returned to hosting artistic and cultural events from story times to jazz brunches, while other upcoming engagements include the bakery’s participation in Princeton’s Pi Day on March 14, which serves the dual purpose of celebrating both the mathematical constant and the birthday of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, who lived in Princeton for more than 20 years while working at the Institute for Advanced Study until his death in 1955.
LiLLiPiES will join the festivities with a “pie flight contest” starting at 8 a.m. in the Princeton Shopping Center, which according to the Princeton Tour Company website for Pi Day 2024, princetontourcompany.com/tours/pi-day, will be offered through 2 p.m.
The “LiLLiPiES Cookbook” originally launched on Pi Day 2020, but its in-store book signing was canceled as the COVID lockdown restrictions went into effect, Carson explains to U.S. 1’s George Point in “Beyond the Menu: How Three Area Eateries are Coping with COVID” from March 2021.
“Weirdly, it worked out for us, because suddenly everyone wanted to learn to bake at home. We originally wanted to launch LiLLiPiES cooking classes along with our cookbook, but of course we couldn’t do that,” she says in the article, adapting to offering baking mixes and kits for their arsenal of artisan sweets instead.
LiLLiPiES continues to uplift other local partners such as Cherry Grove Farm in Lawrence Township, The Bent Spoon and Griggstown Farm in Princeton, Bob’s Buzzy Bees in Hamilton, Harvest Drop in Windsor, the Lima Family Farm in Hillsborough, and more.
February pies, according to the LiLLiPiES website, include the following: cherry crumb; gluten-free vegan strawberry crumb; a Berry LiLLiCAKE, or vanilla cake with a berry swirl, milk chocolate buttercream, and berry powder garnish; passion fruit meringue; brownie; a quiche of the month; and “The LOLA: Persian Love LiLLiPiE,” which features a pistachio frangipane, lemon-rose curd, and rose petals, with 10-percent of sales donated to the World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization that supplies “chef-prepared meals to communities impacted by natural disasters and during humanitarian crises,” according to its website, wck.org.
Meanwhile, the upcoming pies for March are apple crumb, key lime, chocolate chess, cherry, and gluten-free vegan blueberry.
While that roster may change with the season, LiLLiPiES maintains its steady balance of sweetness and sentimentality by being a business that cares throughout the year. And the community, much like the kindergarten class Carson introduced those individual pies to, welcomes them with open arms — and mouths — no matter the flavor of the month.
“Why do bakers do what we do?” Carson writes in the “LiLLiPiES Cookbook.” “The truth is, we love to give people the pleasure of a small treat and a smile in the middle of their day. It’s as simple as that. It’s pure hospitality. Bakers have an unquenchable need to share what we’ve imagined, developed, and prepared, and hope that it will give you a little bit of joy.”
As “Pie For My Birthday” shows, to love is to share, and by savoring each step of a recipe and embracing the process together as a family, you may just come away with a memory as satisfying to the palate as the finished product.
LiLLiPiES Bakery, 301 North Harrison Street, Princeton Shopping Center, Princeton. Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. 609-423-2100 or lillipies.com.
“Pie For My Birthday” is available on the LiLLiPiES website for $22, shipping included, at lillipies.com/product/pie-for-my-birthday-by-jen-carson-and-sofia-schreiber-shipping-included.
