Interview with Cindy Hawkins, owner of Circle City Sweets

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Cindy Hawkins, owner of Circle City Sweets, is a champion baker and staple of the Indy dessert scene. For over 20 years, she’s been making croissants and confections for the city, from their original location in City Market to the AMP at 16 Tech. Her work is also part of the offerings at restaurants and cafes around the city, and she leads Team Indiana at the World Food Championships each year. 

Edible Indy: For those that are not familiar with your story, tell us a little bit about not just your career, but what you’re doing today, and that crowning moment of the World Food Championships, which several years ago might not have meant anything and now means everything.

Cindy Hawkins: Yeah, I own Circle City Sweets. It’s my pastry shop. I’ve been in business for about 20 years now.

I always tell people I’ve got the weirdest backstory. I didn’t plan on doing this. I accidentally became a pastry chef. I had a whole other career path that I loved.

I don’t say it was on a whim, because it wasn’t, but it all kind of happened accidentally. We, thank God, were very fortunate and successful, and opened up a retail shop originally in City Market. We were there for just short of 11 years, then moved to the AMP a little over five years ago. And I started competing in 2015 and didn’t really think a lot of it. And then this year, I took the crown. 

EI: The AMP is a really unique space, I love it. And it’s something that is for entrepreneurs and newbies and the, forgive me, old timers.

CH: Yeah, no, we were sort of anchors at the time. That environment is ripe for education and for mentorship and it’s just, if you’ve never been there, you don’t know it until you walk in. 

It’s so funny because it took a full year before I would even go look at the space. Craig Baker was the chef consultant on the project. Craig’s a really great friend of mine. Like I said, we were at City Market for a long time. my husband and I had four shops at City Market at one point. So we owned a coffee shop that was upstairs, Mile Square; we had my pastry shop and bread shop that were across the aisle from each other; and then we had Circle City Soups. 

When we found out about the City County Building moving, we knew at some point we needed a move. And it wasn’t so much for my shops. We’re doing so much wholesale, we bake for everybody, so my daily sales were kind of the gravy. Between, you know, the farmers markets we were doing and our wholesale accounts and classes and things like that we do, my location wasn’t a huge issue for me, but for Mile Square Coffee, for Circle City Soups, our location was paramount. So we started looking for a new location for when that transition happened.

CH: Craig approached my husband about the AMP, and when they told me where it was, I was like, ‘that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’ And this is why my husband and I work well together. He’s the big picture guy. He’s an amazing chef. He always comes to me with ideas. And my side always says, ‘what’s it gonna cost?’ And when Craig and Roger came to me with this idea about the AMP, I was like, “What on earth is over there? Where’s your walk-up traffic? Because we plan on moving everything over there.” 

It took a full year before I would finally go over and look at this location. I was dumbfounded. I could see the blueprints. I could see the renderings of everything. The Biosciences building was about halfway built. You could really see this vision that they had, but I physically had to see it before I could get it. And it was the best thing we ever did.

Now we of course decided at the end of 2020 to shut down Mile Square and Soups, so we just moved my bread and pastry together into one location. And we really have the biggest footprint in the AMP. We’re the biggest ‘tenant’ I guess you’d say in the building. But it has just been a phenomenal move and I am so grateful we made that jump.

EI: So let’s talk about your actual food itself and the pastries and the desserts and how you differentiate yourself. You said you’re a more logical person than a creative one. How do you create that without being a creative?

CH: Well, you know, that’s why I like baking so much, because baking really is a science. My original career goal as a youth, I wanted to be a pharmacist. I made a career change quickly in college, but I love math and science, and baking is all math and science. Cooking is very different. That’s why my husband’s an amazing chef, he can taste and edit as you go. 

Baking’s not like that. If you mess up your baking powder, you’ve made a horrible mistake. But it’s math and science. And the quality of the ingredient that you use is paramount. The reason my croissant is so good is because of the butter that I use and the process to make that product. When I was a kid, a poor college student, butter was on sale at Walmart for a buck-fourteen a pound ($1.14/lb).

But I also remember when you would cut it, it would kind of shard apart in pieces. It’s because it was all water. There was so much water in that butter! We use a butter called Plugrá now. It’s from Dairy Farmers of America. It’s an American butter, but it’s a European style butter. It’s 82 % butterfat. I can cut a cold pound block of that butter, and my bench scraper just goes right through it. It’s so creamy, so beautiful, so perfect, because it’s butterfat.

That’s what makes that beautiful croissant. So the quality of the product that you use is what really, really makes the difference, you know?

EI: In cooking, I’m learning that art and science aren’t as far apart as people might think. And I find that the fascinating. Have you ever stumbled upon a recipe that shouldn’t make sense on paper but comes together against all the odds?

CH: Oh Gosh, I mean, we have a great selling croissant that happened by accident. I can’t take credit for it. It was actually my head baker, Nicole. Our delivery driver was bringing back our ham from Smoking Goose. Nicole, my head baker, had some jalapeños pickling in the refrigerator for a sourdough she was playing around with. And he knocked over those pickling jalapenos onto a bowl of croissant dough before we had started the process.

She pulled this whole ball of dough out, and she just had this look of horror on her face. There’s just this pool of liquid on top of the plastic wrap. And I said, “carefully remove the plastic.” And so she carefully removed the plastic. I said, “smell the dough.” And she still had this look of horror on her face. And I smelled it. And I said, “well, you’re making a jalapeño croissant this week.” So she just came up with a jalapeño popper filling. It’s a vegetarian one. So our vegetarians like it. It’s cream cheese and cheddar cheese, a little bit of red pepper flakes, and pickled jalapenos.

And it sells like mad now. So it’s on the menu. I wouldn’t have come up with it. And if she had said to me, “hey, I’d like to do a jalapeño popper croissant,” I probably would have said that sounded horrible. And I would have totally shut it down. 

I’m so bad about that. And it’s one of our staples now. It’s sold really, really well. We started taking it to the Carmel Farmer’s Market and people loved it. You know, so things like that happen by mistake. 

But I think that’s why I like the people that I hire. I like to have that mix of people. Tanya Smith was my head baker for 11 years, and I always called her the Da Vinci Brain. She was crazy left-brained. She was a former accountant. She kind of created our processes for our whole bread side when we opened up our bread kitchen. But she’s also an amazing decorator. She’s very, very creative, does beautiful plated desserts. She’s the pastry chef at Our Table now, down in Bargersville. Just beautiful design work, things like that. She’s that great melding of both. 

I like to kind of have those people on my team who can bring that to the table, you know. I joke all the time that the right half of my brain just doesn’t exist.And it’s not really true– like my dessert for World Foods this year, that was mine. And the past couple of years, I’ve really put a lot of work into designing my dishes for World Foods. Before, I think I depended on a lot of other people to kind of give me input and advice. And I still look for that once I’ve kind of come up with my idea, but I think I spend a lot more time now researching and planning and trying to come up with that creative side for those dishes.

EI: So walk me through the World Food Championships, what that process is like. This is the third year that it’s going to be here in Indianapolis. And there’s so many categories, so many days, so much incredible, incredible talent. That had to have been a thrill of a lifetime to win that.

CH: Gosh, yeah. Yeah, it was crazy. So this, like I said, this was my eighth time to compete. I started in 2015. Craig Baker, myself, and Matt Stumm were the three chefs from around here who…

EI: Those are famous names!

CH: Yeah, [Craig Baker]’s been in it every year except for the very first. Well, this past year he didn’t compete. He worked for World Foods doing all of the dishes of all previous winners for a big Taste of the World Foods. So he kind of took a year of competing off this past year, but he’ll be back competing this coming year. 

But yeah, the four of us went down to Florida, competed, and I did not have a great experience. but somehow Craig suckered me back into it. We moved to Orange Beach, Alabama, and I jumped right back in. We made finals, and the bug stuck at that point. Once you make finals, it’s a whole different game. 

You basically have to get qualified to get in. You can’t just decide, “oh, I’m going to sign up and do a World Food Championship.” You have to get qualified somehow. The first time I got qualified was an online recipe contest. So you submit a recipe, you submit photos of your work, and then it’s evaluated by whomever the organizing group is doing that competition.

We won, so we got qualified to get in. There’s a lot of other cooking competitions. Tommy Reddick’s here with Paramount School. Team Indiana, which I’m president of, we help coordinate some. And then World Foods hosts a lot. You can win what’s called a golden ticket. So it’s basically a free entry and a spot in a particular category. Once you’re in that category, there’s 10 different categories, you are then qualified to compete at World Foods. So it’s changed a lot over the years.

Originally we had to do two dishes in one hour. One was a required dish and it had to be done in the first hour. And then you had all two hours to do a signature dish. It’s now kind of gotten pared down a little bit where you have one hour to do a dish. There may be requirements or there may not. There may be a sponsor ingredient you have to use. This year we had pretty much free reign on our first round. And then the top seven are selected to move on to the final round.

We had two catches to it. We had a required ingredient. for dessert, we had to use black pepper. And then you also were given a mystery basket ingredient, which just about killed me when I found out that was going to happen this year. I have a plan, and you’re going to throw this wrench in my plan? Luckily we were given cream cheese, which was very easy for us to work into our dish. 

Then you have one hour to get those dishes turned in to the presentation table. From there, you’re just evaluated and ranked.

EI: The aftermath of winning that and feeling not just vindicated of your life’s work, but to have judges choose your dish over all the rest, that has to be satisfying for you.

CH: It was really exciting. We had the third highest score of all dishes turned in of every category. To know that you had the third best evaluated dish of every single category combined… It was pretty exciting.

When the judges started talking, I knew we won. I always try to be the first one turned in because they tast it in the order that you turn in and depending on what you have, if it’s sitting up there for 15 minutes it could really affect your score.

I wanted to get it right when it’s ready to go and not sitting around. You see people’s dishes kind of dying sometimes up there while they’re waiting.

EI:  So Indianapolis is known for a lot of different things. Hosting big sports events, race. We’ve got a pretty safe, clean, fun downtown vibe. Would you consider Indy to be a dessert city?

CH: You know, I do and I think it’s too bad [people don’t know it.] You know, when I started 20 years ago, there really weren’t a lot of bakeries around. Taylor’s and Crawford’s had just closed. They were a staple, you know, they were right across the street from Methodist Hospital downtown and I was probably about three years from opening up my shop. I went to their auction. I met Mr. Crawford it was just so exciting to me. Renee’s Bakery was really the only bakery around. Albert had opened a couple years before I did and that was really it. We were really the first ones doing macarons in town.

It was funny because years ago I was on the cover of Indianapolis Monthly with a display of them. And when I see that now, they’re hideous. Like I was so new at doing them and they have like the little tail on them. And I’m so embarrassed by that picture now. But it was on the cover of Indy Monthly because we were really the first ones doing them. And I could do such prettier ones now. But, you know, it’s amazing how the dessert scene has changed so much in the last 20 years.

There was a time in this city where if you were a chef at one restaurant, you didn’t eat at your competitors’ restaurants. You weren’t friends with other chefs. You didn’t hang out with other chefs. You didn’t talk well about other restaurants. And now we’re all friends. We all hang out. And it’s funny because on the pastry side, I think people don’t get that we are all friends or a lot of us are friends.

They think we’re really competitive, you know, Laura at Filigree is awesome; she’s a good friend of mine. She’s who actually sent me the information on the edible macaron printer. She sent me a message one day, she said “Cindy I just got this. You need to get one,” and she came over to help me set up the software because I couldn’t figure it out. If we were competitors and backstabbers and she didn’t want me to be able to sell them, she wouldn’t have told me about it and she certainly wouldn’t help me set it up. 

Pete Schmutte owns Leviathan, I worked for him at Wolfgang Puck’s. He’s actually the one who referred me to the pastry school that I went to because that’s where he went. And then when he was between jobs, he would pick up shifts with me at City Market. I mean, we’re all friends. 

EI: So it’s a tight community. It’s a growing community. And this area specifically, when it comes to desserts, I guess the other side of the dinner some people say, “I’m good, none for me.” You’re out to change that with each time.

CH: Yeah, well, I think the nice thing too is a lot of us know what we’re good at and we know what our strengths aren’t. Like I don’t make cupcakes, so when people call me in on cupcakes, I know who to refer them to. I can’t do chocolate work. I know how to do chocolate work, but I can’t control the heat and humidity of the city market, so if somebody wants chocolates, there’s a great shop in Greenfield, J. Evelyn Confections, Jayne’s a wonderful woman. She’s wicked talented. If someone ever wants chocolates, that’s who I’m going to send them to. 

EI: But you know who those people are who are really good at what they do. And so you want to give them that business. That’s not your shtick, if you’re booked… 

CH: If we’re booked solid for something and I can’t get you in, I’m going to send you to the best person I know who might be able to get you in for that job.