Pastry is Play at PinPoint

For Kaitlin Ullman, a career in pastry started in her parents’ garden.

“My love for baking pretty much came from my parents planting a garden that had zucchini in it,” she said. “I started making zucchini bread, and I was like, ‘Wow, I’m really good at this.’”

At the time, Ullman was a 14-year-old freshman in high school, and she began bringing baked goods to sports practices and school fundraisers. Encouraged by her peers and teachers, she spent more and more time baking. When she met with her guidance counselor to discuss post-high school plans, Ullman admitted she wasn’t sure what to do.

“She was like, ‘Well, what do you do in your free time?’ And I was like, ‘I pretty much bake all the time.’ So she said, ‘Well, why don’t you go to college for that?’”

Ullman had no idea that going to college to pursue a career in pastry was even an option. At her counselor’s suggestion, she applied to Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, and was accepted into the competitive “P4” program – four years of pastry-exclusive education to which only about 60 students are accepted each year.

During her time at Johnson & Wales, Ullman completed multiple internships at Walt Disney World, which later led to a full-time position. There, she used Disney’s unique kitchen-rotation policy to move to a new kitchen each year to continue learning as much as possible. Moving kitchens allowed her to focus intently on different aspects of baking, from breads to pastry to cake decorating.

“I just kind of used it as a continuation of knowledge,” she said. “I wanted to be as all-around talented as I could be.”

After several years with Disney, Ullman traveled west to Bend, Oregon, where she became the pastry chef at the acclaimed Sunriver Resort. There, she built a pastry program from scratch.

“I had talked to the executive chef at Sunriver, and he was like, ‘Yeah, if you would like to come up with a pastry program for us, that’d be great.’ So I basically went in there and established a pastry program. I hired a bread baker, everything.”

After three years in Oregon, Ullman decided to move back east to be closer to family and settled on Wilmington. A job at One Belle Bakery gave her a sense of the local scene, but it was the opportunity at PinPoint, where she started in August last year, that gave her the creative platform she was looking for.

At PinPoint, Ullman makes everything from scratch daily, from fresh-baked bread to seasonal plated desserts. She begins each day with bread production for dinner service and then transitions into dessert prep.

“I can basically kind of do whatever I want,” she said. “If one of our vendors is like, ‘Hey, I have strawberries,’ I’m like, ‘Great!’ I get to change my menu and put something on there that has strawberries this week. I’ve never gotten to do that before.”

She thrives in the creative freedom the restaurant offers, describing it as a space where experimentation is encouraged, even pushed.

“Chef Cam always tells me to try to get weird with it, so that’s what I do,” she said. “Like, I never imagined putting fennel pollen in a dessert before. But I tried it out and it worked really, really well. I never get bored because there’s always so much room for play.”

She’s played with ingredients like sunchokes, transforming them into ice cream and smoked caramel. Her favorite dessert currently on the menu is what she calls “The Candy Bar,” a layered homage to classic movie theater treats: peanut butter shortbread, nougat, chocolate mousse and peanut butter mousse all dipped in chocolate and served with toasted white chocolate ganache, popcorn ice cream and crushed pretzels.

“I was trying to think of something that’s a little different, that maybe I haven’t seen before,” she explained. “I thought of something like a candy bar or people’s favorite treats, something nostalgic. And I might try to base a dessert on the flavor profiles but with different textures.”

Ullman enjoys incorporating a savory note into her creations – just enough to pique interest and add dimension.

“Someone might see it on the menu, and that might be the reason why they get it, because they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. I want to try that. I never thought of that ingredient in a dessert.’”

Ullman is an avid note-taker, with an overflowing notebook of recipe sketches and ideas. Once a recipe is finalized, it’s typed up and filed in her “pink binder” of go-to recipes. She also photographs many of her plated desserts to create a portfolio of her work and keep visual records of evolving ideas. For inspiration, she often looks to the work of pastry chef Antonio Bachour, who operates restaurants in Miami and Mexico and is internationally known for his pastry work.

“I just love his work so I’m always looking him up to see what he’s up to,” Ullman said.

PinPoint, located at 114 Market St., is open for dinner service Monday through Saturday. Don’t forget to save room for dessert.