For cakemaker Emma Goss-Custard, turning an enjoyment of baking into a viable business was quite a challenge, as Nikki Ridgway discovers.

Every new business starts with a 'Eureka!' moment. For Emma Goss-Custard, it came  while she was working at a friend's sandwich shop in 1998. 'I realised I loved working with food and it coud be a career.' At the time, she was doing a teaching course at Oxford University, and started bartering handmade cakes in exchange for getting her essays typed. Latching on to this success, she then began delivering her produce to local businesses. 'I invested £50 in a second-hand bike and had to save up the next £20 for the basket,' she recalls. 'It was all quite sweet, innocent and instinctive, and I was happy to come away with £50 profit a
week.'

Fast-forward a few years and Emma and her husband Matt, both 35, are running Honeybuns bakery from their home in Holwell, Dorset, holding meetings in their Bee Shack Cafe (right). Her handmade, gluten-free range of cakes, biscuits and new savoury items are available in Waitrose, and John Lewis Place to Eat and Espresso bars.

The name Honeybuns came from a friend's nickname for Emma ('it's a bit twee and sweet, like the cakes') and was registered after she set up her business in an industrial unit in Guildford in 2001. She was lucky to get a short term lease, and the landlords even paid for some renovation, but this was a hard time for the business. Emma explains, 'We started with about £50,000, juggling 0% APR credit cards, but did become unprofitable for a while - once you grow and become legitmate in the food industry, there are so many costs to cover.'

In addition, the sterile business unit didn't fit with the creative environment Emma had envisaged and, more importantly, foot and mouth disease and rising house prices had forced many of their local suppliers to sell up. A logical choice was to move to the South West, 'one of the best larders in Britain'.

SWEET DREAMS: Emma's products are hand-baked on a low oven setting to really allow flavours to develop. Recipies are simple and homely, with just a touch of the exotic, and great attention to detail - Heathcliffe Brownies, for example, contain West Indian orange oil, while the Coppice Cake (left) includes chocolate buttons stirred in at the last minute to prevent them melting.

They bought Naish Farm in 2002 for £500,000, and recieved a DEFRA grant towards 50 per cent of the bakery conversion, but it was a testing first year, with Matt still commuting to his job in London and Emma working from 4am to 11pm most days. 'It's fair to say I worked my socks off,' she says. 'It was a case of 'stop playing, because this is no longer a game'. We had two employees and that completely changed the dynamic, because you can't mess around with other people's lives.'

Emma's unwavering commitment to the quality of the product is at the heart of the business, and has in many ways anticipated the current trends for locally sourced ingredients and gluten-free products ('I simply preferred the taste of polenta or ground almonds, instead of flour'), but she concedes that other aspects have had to be compromised. 'You have to grow up and realise your creativity must be underpinned by a really sound structure, dicipline and organisation - they're not mutually exclusive - and understanding that has been pivotal for me.'

The business now employs 26 staff, offers 13 vareties of cakes plus a new savoury slice, delivers nationwide and to Europe, and will start a mail order service early next year. They work hard to stay above the narrow margins of the food industry, but money will never be the driving force, she says. 'You can never lose sight of what you want and what makes you happy - if you find it a chore and dread coming to work, what would be the point?'

EMMA'S TOP TIPS

Don't be shy about seeking advice. I picked out people I really admired, even well-known people, and sounded them out.

Play to your strengths. Find a skill set and be ruthlessly honest with yourself, then apply that to the whole team.

Don't be scared of going official. There of lots of regulations in the food industry, but it's not that complicated if you're organised and keep everyone informed from the start.

Find out what kind of business you are going to enjoy running. It is a holistic lifestyle business? Would you like to shut the door and switch off at the end of the day? It's not all fluffy bunnies and pink cafes, and there's no getting away from finances - you have to keep an eye on them, or employ someone you trust to watch the purse strings.

Keep up good communication with your team. We run regular-as-clockwork meetings and involve everyone in some way or another.