Love is in the air — and so is the smell of fresh pastries at Rashida Sawyer Bakery. As Valentine’s Day approaches, Rashida Sawyer Bakery draws in customers with its seasonal desserts. Beyond the festive treats, the bakery brings a story of family, tradition and connection to the Ithaca community.
Located in the Press Bay Court on West Green Street, the family-owned bakery was founded by KC Sawyer and named after his mother, Loraine Rashida Sawyer ’72 — the first Black woman to graduate from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration.
Mrs. Sawyer, originally from the South, moved to Ithaca to attend Cornell and reflected on how her experiences there shaped her journey.
“Being in the hotel school just opened up a whole new world to me — that you can even think that way of owning your own business and to move forward in that direction,” Mrs. Sawyer said.
After graduating, Mrs. Sawyer began baking professionally in the 1980s when she and her husband Csiko Sawyer operated a booth at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market named Rashida’s Deluxe Baked Goods.
She then took a break from business in 1988 to care for her children, but in 2019, her son, KC Sawyer, brought it back to life. Her son began to collect his mother’s recipes when he was young, before opening a bakery in her honor.
“When KC was around 17 years old, he looked at [his mother], and he said, ‘Mom, one day you're going to be gone and all these recipes, they're going to be lost forever. I've got to collect some of them. … Make a cheesecake, and let me write down exactly what you do,’” Csiko Sawyer said.
KC Sawyer did just that and wrote down “everything she did.” Decades later, the recipe “[came] in handy” when he started the bakery and named it after his mother.
While the bakery’s roots trace back to family recipes, its turning point came during the pandemic, when the bakery witnessed a surge in popularity and support from the local community — solidifying its place in Ithaca’s food scene.
At the height of the pandemic, there was an increased effort to support minority-owned businesses. While some customers bought their goods just to support them, they would quickly discover how “dang good” the recipes were, KC Sawyer said.
As a family-owned business, KC Sawyer stressed the important value of prioritizing quality and taste, connecting it to his mother’s philosophy in cooking.
“The number one thing for us is maintaining quality. … We use the best quality ingredients to achieve what we're going for, and that's the way my mom was,” KC Sawyer said. “We had financial issues growing up, but she would make sure that she would find a way to make the quality show up in the food she was cooking, even for just us growing up.”
Every Valentine’s Day, Rashida Sawyer Bakery offers a variety of special desserts. This year, the menu includes Heart Shaped Cheesecakes — Mrs. Sawyer’s classic cheesecake in a romantic heart shape — and the Rose Cupcake Bouquet — an arranged collection of cupcakes frosted to resemble roses.
These festive treats have allowed Mrs. Sawyer to create lasting memories for her customers.
“One couple that I made a wedding cake for in the 80s came back to order another carrot cake around the Valentine's season,” she said. “They remembered me making their cake and how delicious it was.”
KC Sawyer also highlighted how the bakery’s Valentine’s Day offerings help connect loved ones across distances, as “a lot of the Valentine's orders come from parents who are not here, or from significant others who live in other areas, for people who live here at Ithaca for Cornell.”
For Mrs. Sawyer, the connection she has with the Ithaca community stems from the memories people have of her baked goods from the 80s to today.
“When KC first started the bakery, [people would ask] ‘Is this the same Rashida Sawyer that was at the farmers market?’” Mrs. Sawyer said. “That memory of people saying, ‘This was an excellent product, and I love this product,’ is what I want to [continue to] offer to the community – something that tastes good, that looks good and is a quality product.”
