People Who Pie: Slightly Crooked Pies

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: pie season. Whether you’re seeking one of the classics — perhaps pumpkin, pecan or pot pie — or something a bit more nouveau, these three New Hampshire pie shops will happily serve you a slice.

Here are three places that will make your sweet tooth sing.

• Slightly Crooked Pies, Bedford (profile below)
• The Pot Pie Bar, Bedford
• Woodstock Pie and Coffee, North Woodstock

Slightly Crooked Pies, Bedford

Lauren Collins Cline bakes her pies at Slightly Crooked Pies in her more than 200-year-old kitchen.

Lauren Collins Cline baked her first pie at 23, when she hosted her first Thanksgiving. “I really wanted to bake a pie from scratch,” Cline says. “I looked up a recipe on Williams Sonoma, and I used a store (bought) crust because baby steps.” The apple pie she produced was a hit, and the gratification of the experience motivated her to keep making more.

She started posting the pies on Facebook and, eventually, friends asked if they could buy them. When the pandemic hit in 2020, people who were skipping their usual Thanksgiving travel reached out in search of the homemade pies they’d otherwise be missing out on. The ramped-up demand
offered an outlet for Cline, who was a hospital communications director at the time. “I really needed an outlet to just get my mind off of work and everything that was happening in the outside world,” she recalls.

Slightly Crooked Pies became official in January 2021. As a homestead business, Cline is licensed to operate out of her home kitchen in Bedford, which is where the name comes from. Her house was built in the 1740s, about 10 years before Bedford was officially incorporated as a town. “The foundation for (the kitchen) is rudimentary, and there isn’t a level floor anywhere,” Cline says. “No matter how much I’ve tried to adjust the feet on the oven, I still get crooked pies.”

Cline’s creations are primarily fruit- or nut-based, encased by a flaky pastry crust that uses both butter and shortening. Slightly Crooked Pies offers yummy twists on classic flavors — think maple apple, blueberry lavender and chocolate bourbon pecan — including seasonal options that aren’t always in line with the weather outdoors. “Sometimes I’ll do a Tropical Tango pie in January,” she says. “I just need it to feel like summer.” Although she’s in the sweet pie business, Cline says she doesn’t love excessively sweet things. “The first thing I do when I develop or adapt a recipe is reduce the sugar to the lowest possible amount while maintaining the flavor,” she explains.

“I get inspiration (for pie flavors) at the strangest times,” she says. “And those have turned out to be some of my most popular ones. I’ve won awards with those.” One such example is her popular Sweater Weather pie, which has an apple and pear filling that’s seasoned with cardamom. “It’s got this warm, almost outdoorsy feeling about it,” Cline says. “I braid the top to look like a cable-knit sweater.”

While Cline has dreams of opening up a brick-and-mortar store, (“If I were to win the Mega Millions!”) for now, she’s just happy her pies can bring up fond memories for her customers. “Everyone has got a story (about pie),” she says. “You don’t find that with other types of sweets.” slightlycrookedpies.com