We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dini McCullough Amozurrutia a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Dini , thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Last October, I made my boyfriend a Key Lime Pie for his birthday. I knew it was his favorite pie and that I wanted to nail it…so I went to my local Latin grocer, stocked up on Mexican limes (how I’d always thought of them growing up), and tweaked a recipe or two. I’m a decent cook, but I never before thought of myself as a baker. But making things for the people you love is very motivational. And, well, he loved the pie.

The next day or so, he shared some with his co-workers. They started requesting pie and then my kids and friends asked for other flavors and the next thing I knew, I was baking up a storm. People starting ordering pies and paying me money!

This was met with so much enthusiasm that it I began researching what it would take to have a food cottage business (i.e. to make and sell baked goods from my home). My boyfriend and I got the word out and sold pies for the holidays. By January, it occurred to me to approach my local farmer’s market about setting up a pie stand. They turned me down, but this only made me more intent upon finding a venue for selling pies.

A year or two before all of this, my boyfriend had taken me to a winery. I loved the place and remembered that they had food trucks in the parking lot. So I emailed them, sent photos of the pies, and pitched the idea of a pie stand. They invited us out for a pie tasting. We brought five different pies and they loved all of them. As we left the meeting, we realized that this meant taking things to the next level.

I spent the next two months getting certified as food safety manager, obtaining the required licenses and insurance, setting up my LLC, and renting commercial kitchen space, etc.

We launched Dini’s Divine Homemade Pies at Rocklands Farm Winery on Mother’s Day this year.

Dini , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actress and performer. I grew up in Houston and Laredo, Texas and lived with my mom and/or grandmother until I was almost 14.

I later moved to suburban Washington, DC to live with my dad and stepmom. For a variety of reasons, I eventually abandoned my desire to study acting and began a public interest career, eventually going to law school. All the while, I took writing workshops, photography classes, learned to play guitar (sort of!). I talked about writing and imagined I’d one day get around to it. I took the bar and practiced law became a lawyer.

I worked as a public defender, a staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund and also started a law practice with my then-husband. In the early aughts When my sons were still very little, I created a food blog with my madrina where we wrote about Mexican food and family. I began writing short stories and essays, some of which were published in journals and anthologies. A few years later, I launched a literary magazine called Origins Journal (www.originsjournal.com) which was a print and online publication that endured for five years. After this, I began offering a writer’s retreat in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. I got divorced, started my own law practice again, and then the pandemic hit.

In 2020, During the shutdowns, I began drawing and painting daily. I created a website, sold some paintings, and kept trying new things. The solitude afforded me the opportunity to adjust to life as a single woman and mom and the chance to explore visual art. My mother, Rocio Amozurrutia, was an artist in Houston. My dad painted when he was young, and my sister is a painter, too. So, “artist” was an identity that belonged to each of them, not me. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I waded in, thanks in large part to my boyfriend, whom I really credit with helping me realize what was never obvious to me until just a year or two ago: that I am happiest when I’m creating.

Creativity is such a primal, universal thing. When I’m painting or writing or baking, I seem to access a state of being that I can only describe as divine. It’s almost as it if it exists outside of me and I’m just tapping in. It’s my meditation.

This concept, the idea of divinity as the core of creativity, has made its way into my pie business brand. We make small-batch pies with the best ingredients we can find, all by hand, each one perfectly imperfect. The experience of making these pies, of standing for hours rolling out dough, assembling pies, baking and packing them into boxes to sell at the pie stand is no different than producing pages of a story or painting a canvas.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We started Dini’s Divine Homemade Pies with around $5,000, most of which was raised with a Kickstarter campaign over the course of a few weeks. It was amazing to see how excited people were about the idea for a pie business. As I mentioned before, I’ve executed several projects and raised money for them, but there was something about this idea that really drew people in. We exceeded the Kickstarter goal and, even after it closed, I had friends contacting me with offers of support. It was amazing.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I work full-time as a managing attorney for a non-profit legal organization, so Dini’s Divine Homemade Pies is my current side hustle. We are at the start of something and I would love to grow the business, but I am cautious and taking things slowly. For the time being, we are only selling our pies at pie stands a few times a month. The next step will be exploring wholesale production and then possibly retail sales down the road.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dinisdivinepies.com; www.mexilandesigns.com
• Instagram: @dinisdivinepies