Community Corner
New Delights Introduced to "Summer Harvest" Menu at Randell Dodge's Red Barn Bakery
New items including organic peach crumb pie bow in at the Irvington bakery.
Red Barn Bakery owner Randell Dodge has a reputation for creating new baked delights and true to form, a bevy of new seasonal dishes is going on the shelves at her Irvington bakery today.
The new items include:
- Organic peach crumb pie
- French macarons filled with ice cream
- Italian affogato (espresso over ice cream — all organic)
- Blueberry donut muffins
- Zucchini gratin
- Blueberry tarts
Not new but also a refreshing treat is flourless chocolate cake with ice cream and berries.
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Dodge didn’t start out to be a baker. She attended Bennington College in Bennington, VT, where she majored in painting and sculpture and minored in calculus.
She worked in the world of fashion, completing a stint at Givenchy where she multi-tasked as a designer and model; subsequently she freelanced for Ralph Lauren, progressed to designing leather handbags under her own name and spent three years designing cashmere scarves, shawls and home goods in Kathmandu, Nepal.
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“I always liked working with my hands,” she said and added, “Clay and pie dough are pretty much the same to me.”
Baking was part of her childhood; she learned how to bake at an early age. “My mother taught me how to bake when I was twelve,” she said. “We would watch Julia Child and the Galloping Gourmet (Graham Kerr) together on television.”
During her career in the fashion industry, she baked cookies for the handbag buyers at Barney’s, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman and brought cookies to give out at handbag trade shows. The buyers loved them.
She began thinking about pursuing a career change after a Neiman Marcus representative expressed interest in purchasing her cookies for the store to sell. Further encouragement came from QVC which was already marketing her diffusion handbag line to its home-shopping television audience and wanted to offer viewers her cookies too.
When the economy cooled and demand for designer handbags lessened, Dodge noticed that the local marketplace lacked a supplier of organic baked goods. It was a niche she thought that made sense for her to fill. After first becoming a wholesale supplier of baked goods in Bedford, she opened the Red Barn Bakery in Irvington — now in its fifth year.
The Red Barn Bakery is open every day from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Red Barn Bakery, 4 South Astor Street, Irvington, NY, 914-231-7779.
