 DREAM TEAM - Emma and Matt Goss-Custard at Naish Farm, Holwell, where they make award-winning cakes and teach people with special dietary needs how to bake recipes they can enjoy. |
A Dorset couple are ensuring people with special dietary needs can still have their cake and eat it by producing a range of wheat-free cakes.
Honeybuns at Naish Farm in Holwell specialises in baking cakes suitable for people with wheat or gluten intolerant.
The firm, which employs twenty-eight people, was set up in 1998 by Emma Goss-Custard while she was studying for a post- graduate teaching certificate in Oxford and was looking at ways of earning money.
“Back at university in 1998 I was really strapped for cash and thought that, rather then getting a job in the local Co-op, I would go round selling cakes on my bike,” she said.
“Both my mother and grandmother baked delicious cakes and had been using Italian recipes which don’t use nuts and polenta rather then wheat. I cycled round the city with my cakes, based on their recipes, in my bicycle basket and was soon supplying cakes to delicatessens and coffee shops.
“Then I noticed that more and more people with celiac disease, a gluten intolerance, came up raving about my cakes”.
Mrs Goss- Custard, aged 33, realised her true passion was for cakes, not teaching, and in 1999 set up a business in Guildford, where husband Matt was based. Before long, she wanted to move to a more rural area to ensure all her ingredients were sourced locally.
