She lost his card. But in her mind's eye, she can see him. He looked to be in his 70s. Maybe a bit older. He was short. His face was kind. "I managed the Rich's bake shop for 32 years," he said, introducing himself to Angie Mosier, who, with her husband, Johnny, operates Blue-Eyed Daisy Bakeshop at Serenbe, the new, eco-conscious community in south Fulton County.

It was the summer of 2005. Blue-Eyed Daisy had opened just two weeks earlier. The gray-haired man wanted to share what he learned while working for one of the South's most beloved bakeries. Mosier wanted to listen. And she wanted a critique of her coconut cake, cobbled from childhood memories of the sweet temptations of Rich's. But the line at Blue-Eyed Daisy snaked from the counter to the door. And there were cupcakes to frost, cookies to glaze.

LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC Staff (ENLARGE)

Childhood memories of RichÕs cakes inspired Angie Mosier, who runs Blue-Eyed Daisy Bakeshop in south Fulton County, with her coconut cake.

RELATED: • Recipes • John T. Edge on fruitcake John T. Edge series Sweet tea: A Southern icon  Buttermilk recipes  Getting a bit sweet on a sour treasure  Buttermilk: Maybe the next yogurt?  Time changes everything -- even barbecue  Roadside renaissance  High class hooch  SAVING SOUTHERN FOOD: Before Mickey D's ..  Where coconut cake meets sweet tea pie

On the man's second visit later that summer, she got the critique and a semblance of the recipe. Turns out the cake was more complex than it seemed, says Mosier, a 40-year-old former rock 'n' roller with red hair and flashing green eyes, who made her pastry reputation baking wedding cakes for Atlanta's grande dames and their daughters. "He told me it was about the filling and the frosting. About how the dry coconut soaks up the heavy cream for the filling. He told me it was about how the moist, flaked coconut dusts the buttercream frosting. He said it was about process and presentation and packaging."

That last part really got her attention. "When I was little, I loved to watch the woman at Rich's pull a coconut cake from the case and put it in a white box with a big green 'R' in script on top," Mosier, a native of Tucker, says of the trips she and her mother made to the downtown department store. "And they always tied the box with twine so you could carry it through the store or through the streets of Atlanta. That cake was special. So was that box. It didn't come with a UPC code on it. It didn't get pulled across a grocery store scanner like any old package of toilet paper or dog food. It stuck with me. Maybe the only reason I wanted to open this bake shop was to wrap up sweet and simple cakes in white boxes with twine."

Southern bakers like Mosier recognize that, in an era when much sweetness comes on the sly, courtesy of high-fructose corn syrup-enriched everything, the ritual preparation and packaging of old-fashioned, handmade cakes and pies matters more than ever.

Today, our best bakers are, for the most part, respectful of their predecessors. Sure, their creations are nostalgic. (When it comes to desserts, we Southerners tend to trowel nostalgia on like frosting.) And they are playful. But they are not ironic. Not in a Red Velvet Elvis Cake sort of way.

Read cookbooks like Mary Randolph's "The Virginia House-wife" of 1824, and you'll note that the basic tenets of Southern dessert baking have long been in place. Even recipes that sound archaic or contrived — say Randolph's transparent pudding made with sugar, eggs and butter and baked in a pastry crust — may still be recognizable to you and me as chess pie, that simple custardy classic. And more archetypal baked goods like poundcakes, save adjustments in leavening or oven temperature, appear nearly indistinguishable from one cookbook to the next, from one generation to the next.

Recipes for sweet potato pie from "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking," published in 1881 and likely the first cookbook written by an African-American woman, differ little from those developed by Sonya Jones, one of Fisher's culinary and cultural heirs, the proprietor of Sweet Auburn Bread Co. in downtown Atlanta. (Of course, Jones does offer a sweet potato cheesecake with a poundcake crust, but it's so good — and the cultural reference points are so lucid — that Fisher would have cast no aspersions.)

Even feats of seeming excess that in another culture might be chalked up to undue elaboration reveal historical provenance. The 12-layer yellow cakes with chocolate icing long popular in Robeson County, N.C., come to mind. So do the scallop-edged, seven-layer stack cakes of Clinch Mountain, Va., each layer bound to another by an unspiced apple puree. As for stacked pies made with layers of chess and chocolate-chess, I can't prove that Southern bakers have long alternated the two. But I can say that, when served such a stack at Blackberry Farm, the luxe resort in the foothills of Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains, I recognized a dessert with origins in Appalachia.

Martha Foose wants you to recognize her flatland home in her work, too. At about the same time Mosier opened her neo-traditionalist bakery, Foose, along with her husband, Donald Bender, fired the ovens at Mockingbird Bakery in the Delta town of Greenwood, Miss. Set down the road from the Viking Cooking Products Plant, crosstown from the Viking Specialty Products Plant, across the street from a boutique hotel and alongside a spa offering cottonseed oil massages and sweet tea facials, Mockingbird is a showpiece of the culinary-industrial complex that home-grown manufacturer Viking Range has built in the long-bereft area.

Now 38, Foose, whose family roots reach deep into the soil of nearby Pluto Plantation, returned to Mississippi after a globetrot that included stops in France for cooking school and Los Angeles for a stint at La Brea Bakery. "I'm trying to explain this place," Foose says as she tucks and rolls dough for her morning croissants. "People tell stories about a place. Food does, too. It's another language. In the Delta, French palmiers become elephant ears," she says, tossing back her black hair, restraining a pursed-lip smile. "Here, I bake a cookie dough kind of pie for Turnrow Books, just down the street, and call it Gravel Pie because pecans and chocolate chips look — I don't know — familiar, like a gravel road."

Foose calls her approach Delta-centric. That doesn't mean she's bound to the canon of desserts baked since the area was settled some 150 years ago. But she does let the cultural and geographical landscape dictate her roster of offerings.

Take note of her ricotta cheesecake with homemade fig preserves, and she'll tell you that the most prolific fig tree in the Delta stands alongside Vince Fonte's abandoned grocery store at Thornton, Miss. (And she'll smile in such a way that you know she's shimmied that tree.) Ask how she came to bake a sweet tea chess pie, and she'll answer with an offhand comment that suggests anyone with a pitcher of tea in the refrigerator might have done the same thing.

Wonder aloud about why her egg yolks are so luminous, and Foose will tell you that she barters day-old goods — twice-baked almond croissants, errant slices of caramel cake — with local egg man Larry Carver. Ask about her blueberry pie, and she'll launch into a story of John Ashcraft, the farmer who works 270 acres in Leflore County. "He wears a straw hat and carries a cane," says Foose, playing her role as curator of rural culture. "That's exactly what you want in a blueberry farmer."

Make no mistake: Foose and Mosier are modern bakers. They are well-acquainted with the world beyond their fence rows. Their horizons are broad. They own espresso machines. (And they know how to pull good crema.)

What's more, they have peers, women like Phoebe Lawless, who earned her stripes as head baker at the high-concept Magnolia Grill in Durham, N.C. Now working independently, she's known for the salt and pepper shakers tattooed on her left biceps and for being host of an annual pie fantasy party during which friends — some of whom are fellow bakers — go missing in drifts of meringue. Lawless is the kind of woman who knows the history of Coca-Cola cake. She knows how wartime sugar rationing led bakers to use the treacly liquid. And, in homage to the cherry and sugar oomph packed by her home state's most distinctive soft drink, let's fly Cheerwine cake.

And there's Rhonda Ruckman of the sleekly hip Doughmonkey in Dallas. She's a fellow traveler. A native of Louisiana, Ruckman came to Texas by way of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, Calif. Although she sometimes goes goofball, crafting oversize chocolate mousse orbs shellacked with Blue Curacao glaze, her true forte is the gentle tweaking of Southern classics. Ruckman uses cinnamon brioche dough for her king cake. She spoons sweet potato custard into pecan heels. And she gussies up pecan pie, building a hazelnut flour crust, filling it with Louisiana pecans and stirring a custard of old bourbon and new-crop cane syrup.

Modernity only goes so far, however. The best Southern bakers pull up short, just this side of foamed peanut pie and caramel pork rind poundcake. They aren't intent upon reinventing chocolate layer cake. Or chess pie. Or even fruitcake. (OK, so maybe that spiral-bound cookbook standby, Jefferson Davis pie, needs a makeover and a name change. But you know what I mean.)

Many of these bakers consider perfecting the caramel drape on a three-layer yellow cake to be a life's work. And then there's Mosier, who is building her Blue-Eyed Daisy Bakeshop into a sort of Southern cultural salon where, it just so happens, the near-perfect slice of coconut cake can be had for a pittance.

Talk to her while awaiting your turn at the counter, and, as your eyes glide over the burdened cake pedestals and past the refrigerator case stocked with pompom-textured cupcakes, you will witness layer cakes disappearing into white cardboard boxes and clerks tying perfect knots and bows with coarse twine.

But try to praise her for her cakes, especially the coconut, and she'll dodge the compliment, redirecting you by way of her story of a far superior cake baker she met at a church parking lot fund-raiser. Or she'll tell you about a recent outing to old-school McEntyre's Bakery in Smyrna, where, in addition to exceptional petits fours, she fell for its TV Bar, a trademark ingot of devil's food cake with a high-top fade of divinity, the whole affair drenched in chocolate icing.

Tell her point-blank that you want to talk about that coconut cake, and she may speak to you about the kindly older gentleman who once shared some of the secrets of Rich's with her. "Like a big dummy, I lost his card," she'll say. "He was standing here. Right here!" And then, on the off chance that she somehow overlooked it the last 20 times she searched, she'll duck back into her office, ever hopeful.