Sunday mornings, Patty Thorne bakes scones.

The 58-year-old hairdresser then asks her husband to drive around North Andover on his way to pick up a newspaper and drop off the scones at the homes of their close friends.

“Every Sunday morning, honest to God, every Sunday morning I go deliver scones,” said Ron Thorne, her husband of 37 years. The scones are so popular, he said, that some of the guys squirrel them away so their wives won’t eat them.

That’s what Patty Thorne loves best about cooking: Other people enjoying it.

By day, she cuts men’s hair at Mal’s Barber Shop in downtown North Andover, where some of her clients have been coming to her for 27 years. By night, she is an accomplished cook and hostess.

She loves throwing dinner parties in her newly built North Andover home, typically starting preparations a month in advance. She makes her own salad dressings, pastas and family recipe Italian pizza. For her annual Christmas party, she makes homemade onion poppy seed crackers.

Scones, cookies and other baked goods are her specialty. The scones are so good that Emporio Gourmet, a coffee shop in downtown North Andover, now sells about four dozen a week.

“When I make the lemon-blueberry, sometimes there’s one person, I don’t know who it is, who will come in and buy every one of them,” Thorne said. “They’re $2.50 each, so they’re not inexpensive, and they buy all of them.”

That’s not all, manager Cesar Marinaro said.

“I have another one that picks up all the cranberries,” he said. “Another one, all the cherry-almond. I have a lady that comes in and buys one of each kind.”

Thorne learned to bake as a child, using cookie recipes from her mother’s cookbooks. She and her husband both grew up in Woburn, where they met in high school and started dating. Patty’s mother was always cooking.

Ron, whose family is Irish, remembers the first Thanksgiving dinner he spent with Patty, whose father is Italian. Her mother served antipasto followed by lentil soup, meatballs, sausage and ravioli. Ron loved the food, but he was upset that he was going to miss out on the traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner.

He need not have worried. After the full Italian meal, Patty’s mother brought out a turkey and all the fixings. Ron went home and told his parents the fantastic story of what he witnessed.

“They would eat like for four to five hours,” he said. “And there was wine in between.”

That’s just the setting in which Patty grew up. Her mother cooked all sorts of food from her own recipes, most of which she had memorized. It was only natural for Patty to experiment, too.