Pie and pie and more pie. And still more pie. And cake for Thanksgiving

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Key lime pie for Thanksgiving? Banana cream? Lemon meringue? Cake of any sort? These all sort of baffle Susan Sarich, the owner of SusieCakes bakery. She’s a purist, and her shop expects to sell about 500 apple, pecan and pumpkin pies today.

That’s not to say the popular Brentwood bakery will refuse to take your money for banana pudding or red velvet cupcakes. They also have layer cakes decorated with a turkey, and turkey-shaped butter cookies frosted for the day.

‘People like variety,’ Sarich conceded Tuesday afternoon as the employees in the bakery piled pies in the front window, decorated cookies and baked batch after batch -- as many pies as they could get into their ovens for the holiday.

Sarich will miss being with her family in Chicago, where pumpkin pie will be on the menu for Thanksgiving. So why didn’t she open her shop there? ‘That’s a question my mother asks me every week when we talk,’ she said with a laugh. But it was her goal to spread the baked goods of the Midwest to California.

-- Mary MacVean