Tonya Council isn’t one to leave good enough alone. She likes to keep tinkering in the kitchen until she discovers something great. It’s a trait she learned at her grandmother’s elbow. It didn’t hurt that her grandmother was Mildred Council, the woman most people who know anything about Southern food called Mama Dip. Since her passing, in 2018, generations of offspring have kept her long-standing Chapel Hill, North Carolina, restaurant going and branched out to create their own successful food businesses. “She raised me, so I was always by her side,” Council says. “I caught the bug that way.”
An entrepreneur in her own right, with an online cookie business and a retail shop in Raleigh, Council opened a new bakery, Tonya’s Cookies & Bakeshop, in Chapel Hill last November. One of the stars is the pecan crisp cookie she developed more than a decade ago by fooling around with her grandmother’s pecan pie recipe. After her grandmother tasted the cookies, she encouraged Council to get them out into the world on her own, which is exactly what she did. “Don’t leave here,” she told her granddaughter, “but go off and do a little and come back.” Council’s big break came when Oprah Winfrey included the cookies on her list of Favorite Things in 2021.
Another treat that flies out the door at Council’s new bakery? Her strawberry-lemon bars, which started out as a favor for a friend who requested plain old lemon bars at her wedding. Ever the tinkerer, Council added the strawberries as a nod to spring and her friend’s love of the color pink, balancing the tartness of the lemon curd with the sweetness of ripe berries. “You could play around and use any citrus,” she suggests. Orange could work well, she says, though it’s not her favorite. Lime too.
A blender is essential. It makes mixing the curd a snap and gives it a particular silkiness. (Council also runs her cheesecake filling through the blender for a similar effect.) To make it easier to cut neat, clean squares, she recommends lining the pan with parchment paper to lift the bars before slicing, keeping it long enough so that some hangs over the edges. Parchment can be tough to tame, so she uses a few shots of baking spray as a sort of glue to hold it down before adding the shortbread crust, which she gently pats into place. Those are just some of the many tricks she picked up from Mama Dip.
“I learned everything in that kitchen,” Council says. “Mama Dip has been opening doors for me from the start.”
