Pastry chef Heather Dickie shows off some of her freshly made butter tarts, which Canadian Living deemed some of the best in Ontario.

When most people think of Brock University, butter tarts likely don’t come to mind.

But the sweet treats sold at the Guernsey Market could rival our sport management and accounting programs, and even our undefeated football team as our claims to fame.

For that we can thank Heather Dickie, the University’s pastry chef since January, and former owner of a landmark on the Kawarthas-Northumberland Butter Tart Tour. Last year, when Dickie was still operating her Cravings Bakery & Market in Perterborough, Canadian Living magazine came knocking and, after sampling the goods, deemed her tarts among the best in Ontario.

And now they’re baked daily at Brock.

“I never thought I’d do butter tarts,” Dickie admitted one morning recently while making another batch of the baked good that’s as Canadian as a Nanaimo bar. “I thought it would be fine desserts and pastries. That’s what I was trained to do.”

Dickie graduated from Niagara’s College’s culinary arts program and set off to Peterborough with her then-partner and culinary Olympian Kyle Guerin. There they opened Cravings to make fine dining deserts, but soon customers started asking for the comfort foods of the baking world: Chelsea buns, breads, and the sweet tooth’s perennial favourite, the butter tart.

Dickie and Guerin dug deep into their recipe archives and began tweaking their findings to make the perfect tart. The filling recipe is from Heather’s great- grandmother and the pastry is a modified version of that made by Guerin’s grandmother.

Soon after putting butter tarts on the menu, Dickie was asked to join the Butter Tart Tour, and her path to baking fame was set.

“Ever since then, the butter tarts just took off like crazy,” she said.

Dickie started hosting dedicated butter tart sales to satisfy what seemed like an insatiable hunger for the ooey gooey treats. Fans would devour 3,000 in two days.
“We’d just be pumping them out on no sleep like crazy,” she recalled.

A typical day saw 20 dozen go out the door. At Brock, Dickie turns out a more leisurely four dozen – “very slow for me” – along with the other cakes, cookies and pastries available at the market.

So what makes the perfect butter tart?

A flaky pastry, for starters, and a runny centre. She’s also firmly on Team Raisin when it comes to additions to the filling.

But more than that, “it’s the touch,” Dickie said.
“Anyone can follow a recipe but it’s the technique you bring to it.”