Good news for Peterborough foodies: soon you’ll be able to make your own Blackhoney recipes at home as the founder and long-time owner of the Peterborough bakery and coffeehouse, Lisa Dixon, is collecting nearly 20 years’ worth of culinary memories to put together her own cookbook.
Expected to take three years to produce, the cookbook will include some beloved Blackhoney favourites including vegan and gluten-free pastries, homemade dressings, hot dishes, breads, and so much more — Dixon herself doesn’t even know everything that will end up on the pages yet.
“Storytelling is so important with food and, if we think about it more, I think we learn to appreciate what we have locally and why a local coffee shop or restaurant is important to us,” Dixon says. “It has to be supported by the community. I think a cookbook is the best scenario because it will turn all that into a story.”
Shortly after moving from Ottawa where she studied, worked, and raised her children, Dixon opened Blackhoney Desserts and Coffeehouse in downtown Peterborough in 2005 at a time when it was “hard to find good desserts” in the city. She expanded to start a catering business a few years later and then opened the bakery at the back of the store in 2011.
Despite selling her empire in December 2023 to spend more time with family, Dixon has not left the kitchen. With the suspension of the culinary programs at Fleming College where she taught for more than a decade, she has taken on a position with Durham College teaching introductory classes in pastry arts and culinary arts.
She is also a sitting member for the Kawartha Youth Orchestra and their Upbeat! Downtown program and has taken on consulting work at the request of colleagues.
“I realize I have a lot to offer that a lot of people either don’t want to do or don’t know how to do. so I created a format,” Dixon says. “My consulting looks at what you need do to get to success, like looking at creating the menu and planning your kitchen layout.”
Instead of searching for more clients and projects, Dixon is redirecting her efforts to her “passion project” of crafting a cookbook — a dream she has had for a long time. Having studied art history, archaeology, and ancient civilizations in school, she has always taken an “anthropological approach” to her work.
“Whenever I work, I draw and I write, and everything has to do with laying out a logbook or drawing something,” she says, noting that when she was starting to cook, she approached it in the same way. “I would look at a lasagna and think about where it came from. What’s its origin?”
For example, if the lasagna recipe didn’t have eggplant, she would reason it came from northern Italy where eggplant doesn’t grow. From there, Dixon would draw the dish and write out the recipe before giving it to the staff to produce.
She adds it’s the same process for those ordering wedding cakes: from working with the client to finding the right concept that tells a story before any baking is done.
“I thought about all this work I have in my head, but also literal files and files of work, and knew it would have to go into some type of cookbook,” she explains. “It’s really about asking ‘How did I get there?’ The narration of how I got there is so important because these recipes aren’t from other cookbooks — they’re from years of working in the industry, and manipulating and improving (the recipes).”
Some of the recipes to be included in the cookbook are for Dixon’s signature quinoa lasagna, scones, pizza dough (which many people have been asking her for), and cookies, and well as some of her specials she only makes during the holidays, like her famous rumballs and plum pudding.
“There will be little things about how to roast the garlic, and where I sourced out the crab apples for the famous crab apple rosemary jelly,” she says. “My goal is the process and how to get there.”
Each recipe will be connected to a story about the dish, with Blackhoney as the narrative weaved through the cookbook. Many of the stories will include memories around the community with events like Artsweek Peterborough and Blackhoney’s partnership with organizations like 4th Line Theatre which, Dixon says, “became a really big part of my success.”
“All these things are important to the way Blackhoney came to be because they became my community,” she says.
The cookbook will also take readers down memory lane with stories of Cake Diva, Dixon’s “alter ego” who would judge people on their cake designs for others to buy, with local celebrities like Peterborough mayor Jeff Leal and former Peterborough-Kawartha MP Maryam Monsef taking part. She assures photos will also make it onto the pages.
“Over 18 years of Blackhoney, we’ve met so many people,” Dixon recalls. “We’ve done weddings and I’ve seen women breastfeeding babies and now they’re in university or they’re doctors, including my own doctor who I remember coming in as a teenager. We’ve seen some sad things too. We’ve seen customers that came in every day for coffee who have passed away, and the staff and I just couldn’t believe they were gone.”
Currently, Dixon is in the process of recreating and rediscovering her recipes, taking them from dishes that served weddings and large groups and altering them for a cookbook that feeds a household of three to five people. As they get perfected, she will doing taste-tests — yes, she is looking for willing volunteers — and getting the dishes photographed for the book, before writing up of the history and stories that go with each of the recipes.
While revisiting her recipes and thinking about all that she wants to put in the cookbook, Dixon has spent a lot of time in the past. She admits that, when she first sold Blackhoney, she didn’t easily adjust to her new life without the business and that it was difficult to let go and move on what’s next.
“This is a good way of doing that because it’s a closure and it’s a celebration at once,” she says. “The staff in the morning, and the meetings, sitting with a bride — I do love all these things, but my creativity is still there and I’m still pumping out great ideas, so I’m embracing that, and the cookbook will be a big therapy session.”
Anyone wants to be involved as a taste-tester for Dixon’s cookbook can email her at lisajoydixon@gmail.com.
