Pittsburgh's CobblerWorld bakery offers sweet, made-from-scratch treats

Terina J. Hicks is serving up something sweet with her CobblerWorld bakery. Beyond just the taste of Hicks’ sought-after desserts, her personality and magnanimous spirit bring customers back.

CobblerWorld was founded after a layoff from Carnegie Mellon University.

“Something just said go back to baking,” she said.

Baking came naturally to Hicks. She started baking at age 14 under the tutelage of her mother. Hicks’ favorite thing to make is peach cobbler — the first thing her mom taught her. She is a from-scratch baker, making all of her dough fresh, a process that can be tedious, but rewarding in taste.

“She’d teach me how to make the crusts, gather the peaches and all the spices together and so forth. That was one of my earliest experiences,” she said.

She started CobblerWorld in 2014 and now has two locations, Downtown and CobblerWorld Cafe Grab ‘n Go inside the Allegheny General Hospital Suburban Campus in Bellevue.

Hicks began experimenting with cheesecakes, pound cakes and pies to add more value and variety to the business.

She credits some of her success to being part of Catapult Greater Pittsburgh, which helped scale her business and allowed her to open a second location.

One bite inside of Hicks’ key-lime pie is transformational — a not-so-great day slowly rearranging itself into a more hopeful one, a hug in the form of a sweet treat, according to longtime customer and fellow entrepreneur Jill Smallwood.

“We formed a friendship out of that,” said Smallwood, who owns a dump truck company. Smallwood began buying Hicks’ products for family gatherings and ordering smaller versions for herself. “I really love Terina’s products, I love the fact that they are homemade.”

Picking a favorite is tough, Smallwood admitted, but she has a top two: the key lime pie and the banana pudding.

Hicks grew up the fourth of nine siblings, mainly in Garfield in the late ’60s and ’70s. Family dinners were big. Much of her baking style comes from her mom, who passed five years ago. Mamie Lou’s Peach Cobbler honors her memory.

“My mom, she would be so proud of me right now. The first project that we did with Millie’s (ice cream) was Mamie Lou’s Peach Cobbler Ice Cream. She wanted to put my picture up there, and I said, ‘No, we have to put my mom’s picture.’ So my mom’s picture was on all the ice cream tanks.”

“The food industry, I would say, is one of the toughest industries to be an entrepreneur in because taste is subjective, and people are fickle.”

Hicks initially was set on being an engineer or an attorney. Hicks ended up getting her undergraduate degree in computer systems technology and communications at Duquesne University and received her master’s from Carnegie Mellon University.

“Back in our day, there was no real guidance. There were no examples of entrepreneurs or of people of color we would see who were doctors, attorneys or engineers. There were no real examples that we saw growing up that we could kind of shadow and model our lives after,” Hicks said.

Her background in engineering proved to be handy.

“In engineering, you have to really measure everything, and it helps me with my baking. I always tell everyone: if you are going to be a baker, you have to measure out everything,” Hicks said.

Hicks is in the kitchen nearly seven days a week. She tries to prep things the day before if she knows what she will prepare. She makes all her dough from scratch and bakes it ahead of time and puts it in the freezer so she won’t have to stop when she needs it.

If she’s making a cheesecake, she’ll make the batter, throw it in the oven, and once it cools, put it in the freezer and decorate it a couple of days later.

“My baking process is very tedious. There is nothing mundane about it,” Hicks said.

Hicks has a few upcoming projects, including cookies, cupcakes and scones for Howmet Aerospace, based on the North Shore. She has a speaking engagement at Covenant Church of Pittsburgh on the sweet journey of entrepreneurship on Feb. 22, and she does a partnership with Millie’s Ice Cream every February — a Red Velvet Gob flavor.

Hick’s said her sons and her husband of nearly 22 years are her biggest supporters.

“It is important as an entrepreneur, that you have that support. The journey can get lonely and hard if you don’t have that support to say, ‘OK, you came this far, you can keep going,’” Hicks said.