The Atlanta pastry pop-up that’s raising funds for Palestine

Late on Sunday morning, Vinny Pellegri was setting up his pop-up, Vinny’s Mutual Aid Bakery, outside a cafe and market on Memorial Drive. Spread out on a picnic table in front of him was a tray of freshly baked focaccia with seasonal vegetables from Freedom Farmers Market, a container full of cannoli shells waiting to be filled, and a neat row of metal containers with the garnishes: strawberries, edible flowers, sea salt, and Parmesan cheese. 

As he finished laying out the spread, and as a few patrons milled around waiting for the pop-up to open, he spoke to 285 South about the irony of the moment. “It is a weird juxtaposition of making and selling food to give to folks, when there’s this huge famine,” he said.

Unless you’ve been following Vinny on Instagram, you wouldn’t know that the inspiration behind the meticulously laid-out fresh ingredients in front of him was across the Atlantic Ocean, over 6,000 miles away. The threat of famine he was referring to is in Gaza—where the World Food Programme has warned that, due to Israel’s blockade, starvation is imminent.

By day, Vinny works as an instructional designer at a software company, creating online learning courses for new managers. 

Last summer, the East Atlanta resident found that the dismay he felt over Israel’s siege of Gaza was reaching a boiling point. For months, he had been watching videos on his phone of the war’s carnage. “I think it was just the buildup of what had been happening,” said Vinny. He’d been sympathetic to the  Palestinian struggle since taking a class in college over a decade ago, but his involvement in the issue deepened after October 7, when he started sharing social media posts and calling his senators. “I remember at the time like there was—and there still is, obviously—a massive amount of funding from our government going to Israel,” he said. “I think I just got to the point where I was like, sharing on social media wasn’t enough.” 

“I think I just got to the point where I was like, sharing on social media wasn’t enough.” Vinny Pellegri, Vinny’s Mutual Aid Bakery

His calls to the offices of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock also felt inadequate; with the exception of a single vote last fall to limit weapons sales, Georgia’s two senators have consistently voted to keep sending military aid to Israel.

“Like a lot of us who’ve been advocating and trying to bring awareness to what’s happening in Gaza, I just felt pretty helpless about what I can do,” Vinny said. But rather than falling into despair, he focused on what he knew how to do: “I’ve always loved to cook. I’ve always loved to bake.” 

He began experimenting with recipes for cannoli, the Sicilian dessert consisting of a fried tube-shaped shell and sweet ricotta cream filling. Vinny grew up on a farm in California and comes from a large Italian American family; his dad has seven brothers and sisters. Though he hadn’t been unfamiliar with cannoli, it was a visit to a cafe in Madrid earlier in the summer that had him thinking about the pastry’s potential: “What really caught me by surprise, and what made me order it, was that it was a savory cannoli,” he said—filled with whipped ricotta, lemon zest, and a confit tuna. “For a lot of people that sounds really weird and off-putting, but to me I was just excited by the idea of something that was nontraditional for the filling.”

On Instagram, he’d also been following a Durham-based baker—Triangle Pastries 4 Palestine—who had been organizing local bake sales and donating money directly to families impacted by Israel’s war in Gaza, as well as another North Carolina baker, Camille Cogswell, who had been donating money to victims of Hurricane Helene. Both were doing what they described as mutual aid work—which, Vinny says, is essentially just getting “money from our community and put[ting] it into the hands of people who need it.”

He decided to sell cannoli and donate 100 percent of the money to Care for Gaza, a group that supports families in the besieged Palestinian territory and that, he said, “was keeping folks on the ground there, [giving] medical aid, cash, water, food, tents.” 

Vinny put up a simple social media post titled “Cannolis for Gaza,” with the menu, the cost, and the cause. “I basically had a set amount of cannoli that I was gonna make. I think at the time it was like 90.” He advertised preorders on Instagram and Twitter, “and it really took off,” he said. “I sold out online in under an hour.”  

The next step, of course, was making the cannoli. Vinny started with a visit to a place dear to his heart: the farmers market. “I grew up selling produce at farmers markets, and so there’s like a personal connection for me of going to a farmer’s market to kind of start the process.” He chose produce that was in season at the time: blueberries and tomatoes.

The process that Vinny developed for that first outing is one he mostly still follows: He picks the produce before developing the recipe. “I want the seasonal produce to really shine,” he said. “And so what are all the ways that [the seasonal produce] can show up in a cannoli shell, as a vehicle?” For the strawberry cannoli, for instance, he mixed black pepper into the dough, because “pepper enhances the flavor of the strawberry, to make it taste more like itself,” he explained. After he’s decided on the recipe, Vinny makes the dough, which is made with liquid that includes egg yolk and white wine vinegar—“to really help with the bubbling” that gives the cannoli those signature blisters. He fries the cannoli and preps all the fillings a day ahead, so everything is ready to be assembled the day of the pop-up. 

The whole process takes almost a week. The end products, though, are worth it. For his debut pop-up, Vinny sold a blueberry cannoli made with ricotta, blueberry jam, lemon zest, and pistachios; a tiramisu-inspired one with an espresso shell and a cocoa and vanilla ricotta filling; and a savory tomato cannoli with a black pepper shell, tomato jam, ricotta, basil powder, and lemon zest.

By the end of that pop-up, which was out of his house, he raised around $1,100, all of which he donated to Care for Gaza. 

The savory tomato cannoli were a particular hit—but it was more than just the cannoli that resonated with people. “People were genuinely excited about sharing about the fundraisers, sharing about the pop-up, and that it was going to help with Gaza aid,” Vinny said. “And so that was really inspiring, and kind of gave me the momentum to really see how this could take form and something that was ongoing and sustainable.”

And he hasn’t stopped since. Almost every month since July, he’s hosted another pop-up, whether directly from his house, at a neighborhood yard sale, or outside a market near where he lives in East Atlanta (the date for his next one will be posted here). He’s even done a pop-up at a Palestinian cafe in Chicago (all organized through Instagram!). And though aid to Gaza remains his focus, he’s also raised money for other causes: On Sunday, Vinny donated proceeds to the Sameer Project, an aid initiative led by Palestinians in the diaspora, as well as the Trans Housing Coalition, a trans-led group supporting unhoused trans people in Atlanta. He’s also given money to support Hurricane Helene relief and victims of the Los Angeles fires.

His advice for others who want to start their own mutual aid effort? 

One: Keep it simple. “Simplicity for me was like, I really wanted to do cannoli, because it’s hard to find cannoli in Atlanta,” he said, explaining that while you might find more traditional, sweet cannoli, it’s harder to find much else. “I call them seasonal cannoli, because each cannoli is always going to be a little bit different depending on what’s available by season. And so for me, I was like, I really just want to stick to that one thing, or until I get it right and do it really, really well.” (He has expanded his menu, though, offering freshly baked focaccia at recent pop-ups!)

Two: Just try it once. “Just putting it out there, just doing it. People can tend to overthink or want things to be 100 percent dialed in or perfect, and sometimes scrappy, it teaches us more and gets something in the hands of people quicker.”

Finally, Vinny says, remember that mutual aid is about building community—once he launched his pop-up, people who also care about the causes he’s supporting emerged all around him, wanting to help. An artist in Texas designed the logo for this bakery; a friend started doing food photography for him; and other fellow bakers, like Teresa Finney of At Heart Panaderia, regularly come out to support his pop-ups. 

That sense of community is helping Vinny keep his eye on the bigger picture. “It’s great that people can come out and support and that the funds go to Palestinians, but I don’t want that to be the only thing that people take away from this type of thing,” he said. “It’s got to be more than just commerce. While this takes, you know, a week’s worth of prep and organizing, there’s still more I can do.” 

Follow Vinny’s Mutual Aid Bakery and updates about his next pop-up, here.