Southern Girl Bakes is a Southern dessert bakery created by Lorre Jacobs Daniel: professional baker, former bakery owner, Food Network Cupcake Wars champion, and lifelong student of the Southern table. Our desserts are the culmination of years of professional baking, family traditions, inherited food knowledge, and a deep appreciation for the ingredients and techniques that have shaped Southern baking for generations.
We exist to preserve and celebrate Southern dessert traditions, to tell the stories behind the food, and to create thoughtfully made peach cobblers and sweet potato pies that bring a little history—and a lot of comfort—to the table.
A Smaller Menu. A Deeper Story.
Southern Girl Bakes is returning to the desserts that have always felt most like home.
This holiday season, our kitchen is concentrating on just two Southern classics: peach cobbler and sweet potato pie.
They are desserts built from simple ingredients, family tables, church suppers, Sunday dinners, storefront bake sales and generations of Southern bakers who understood that dessert was rarely just dessert.
We bake them in small batches, for a limited season, with the kind of attention that is difficult to give a menu with twenty things on it.
READ OUR STORY →
The Peach Cobbler
Peaches, pastry and the complicated little question of what actually makes a cobbler a cobbler.
Explore the history, technique and Southern Girl method behind one of the South's most coveted desserts.
Our Story
The Southern Table Has a Long Memory
I came to Southern food through people before I ever came to it through history.
My grandmother Bernice baked and sold desserts from grocery storefronts while building businesses, buying property, and creating a life defined by hard work and independence. I didn’t have the language of foodways then. I just knew food, work, and care for people belonged together.
That lesson followed me into my own baking career.
There were friends and family who believed in the work before there was much evidence they should. People like showed up in different seasons of my life and business. My family carried cakes, recipes, and opinions into the kitchen. Some helped with the work. Some bought the desserts. Some saved newspaper clippings, celebrated milestones, or simply reminded me that what I was building mattered.
Over time, I started seeing the ingredients on my counter differently.
Sweet potatoes. Peaches. Pecans.
They are ordinary Southern ingredients until you start asking questions.
Who grew them? Who cooked them? When were they harvested? How did one generation teach the next what to do with them?
African American foodways are part of that larger story—people carrying agricultural knowledge and cooking traditions forward, adapting to what was available, and shaping what we now think of as Southern cooking. Sweet potatoes became rooted in Black Southern kitchens; peaches became part of Georgia’s identity; pecans found their way into cakes, candies, pies, and holiday tables.
And all three remind me that Southern cooking has always moved with the seasons.
A peach is meant to have a moment.
So is a sweet potato.
There is something different about baking when you begin with what the land is giving you instead of deciding in advance what you want to make.
That is part of what I am returning to with Southern Girl Bakes.
I am still a professional baker. I still care about technique, texture, and getting a crust just right. But I am more interested in the story underneath the recipe—the farmers, home cooks, bakers, family members, and friends whose hands moved these foods from one table to another.
For me, Southern Girl Bakes is becoming a place to explore that inheritance.
Our Current Order Policy
We are not accepting individual weekly orders or custom dessert orders at this time. Thank you for supporting our focused small-batch model.