When Emma Goss-Custard sold cakes to office workers, they raved about them. Now Honeybuns products are wowing our customers too. Judith Zerdin reports.

With a name like hers, it would be hard to imagine Emma Goss-Custard to be involved in anything other than the world of cookies and cakes. As director of Honeybuns, the Dorset-based company that specialises in cookies, cakes and flapjacks, all of which are wheat-free and many of which are gluten and dairy-free, Emma has certainly found her niche.

Honeybuns, which supplies us with its branded gluten-free Heathcliffe Brownie, named as such because it's "dark, moody and meaningful" , made from dark Belgian chocolate and orange, and its delicious Cranberry and Pecan Flapjack, is a true slow-food Mecca, tucked away in the Dorset countryside.

The imaginative products, which include the gluten free Congo-Bar, comprising polenta shortbread topped with pecans, caramel, coconut curls and Belgian milk chocolate, and the dairy and gluten-free Mooosh Bar, made from chocolate, polenta and mint, are handmade by a small team in Emma's bakery, housed in a converted stone cowshed on her farm six miles south of Sherborne, in the little village of Holwell.

The bakery isn't the only building to have been transformed - the Honeybuns office was once a pigsty, and the Bee Shack Cafe, which is open once a month to local residents and Honeybuns devotees, was a chicken shed in its former life. Emma and her husband Matt converted the ancient site to house their bakery and business when they moved to Dorset from Guildford in 2002, but kept the rustic look and feel of the original farm buildings as much as possible.

The business itself had very humble beginnings - it "wobbled into existence", as Emma puts it, back in the '90s, when she started delivering made-to-order, homemade sandwiches and cakes to offices in Oxford on her bicycle, having recently completed a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate of Education) course at the University.

"I realised very soon that I wasn't cut out to be a teacher," she confesses. "But I had always loved cooking and baking- nothing fancy but good honest stuff."
Fortunately for her, her PGCE tutor agreed- and recommended that Emma go and work for her husband, who ran a patisserie in Oxford.

That was the first of many "light-bulb moments" in Emma's career- she loved working there and soon began to think about setting up her own business. So she started to make sandwiches in her kitchen at home and deliver them, on her bicycle, to offices in the city's industrial area. "I made cakes, too, but as an add-on to that. The sandwiches were popular but it was the cakes that people raved about- they had the 'wow' factor".

And so Honeybuns was born. Soon after that Emma and her husband, Matt, moved to Guildford for his work and she continued to bake cakes in their kitchen. She used her granny's recipes, which contained hardly any wheat flour, substituting polenta, ground almonds, hazelnuts and pistachios as her granny had done. She decided to go completely wheat free when coeliac customers later asked if Honeybuns products were safe for them to eat.

It was around that time that she had started working with Partnership for the first time, starting off in John Lewis cafes- which she still supplies. "I had no marketing or packaging- just little cling film- wrapped cakes with handwritten labels on them," she says. "I put some samples in my granny's basket, which seemed like a fitting receptacle, and jumped on the train to London to see the John Lewis buyer.

"I was amazed when she said the cakes were absolutely delicious. Waitrose followed soon afterwards and I started to supply a number of local branches in Surrey."

By that time she had had to move the business out of her kitchen and into a small rented unit, but that brought its own problems and in 2002 the Goss-Custards decided to move to Dorset.

"We'd always had this 'retire to the good life' vision for when we were old and grey, and we thought, why don't we bring all that forward? Dorset had always been a dream destination for us- it's a real foodie county, I love Thomas Hardy's novels, and Matt's from here originally.” she explains.

In fact the surname "Custard" hails from Dorset, as does, according to Emma, the surname "Honeybuns". The business has quite a following among the Dorset Honeybuns, apparently.

And so they moved- and the conversion process of the farm started. Emma kept her original customers by using couriers, and expanded into Waitrose branches around the south west. "People couldn't understand how we could work in such ramshackle buildings," Emma confesses. "But we wanted to take what we had and make the best of it- a sort of conservation at grass roots level."

The way the couple converted their surroundings fits in perfectly with the Honeybuns ethos- to be environmentally-aware, community minded business. The company sources as many of its ingredients from local suppliers as possible- Emma collects the eggs from a local free-range chicken farm twice a week, the honey is sourced from a Dorset honey farm, the vegetables, bread, meat and dairy products eaten on the farm and served in the Bee Shack are bought from the post office in the neighbouring village of Alweston, which in turn sources everything from local farmers, the cheese is made on a dairy farm literally just down the road- and even the Fairtrade coffee served in the Bee Shack is ground roasted on a nearby farm.

As well as sourcing ingredients locally. Emma strives to do everything as sustainably as possible. The plastic film around the cakes is made from biodegradable corn starch; the recyclable card "cake board" inside is from a sustainable source and Emma suggests they can also be kept and used as bookmarks; the inks are made from vegetable oil, and the cake boards promote not-for-profit organisations that Honeybuns supports, such as the Somerset and Dorset Animal Rescue Centre and a donkey sanctuary in Sidmouth. As much as possible is recycled, the farm's security lights are run by solar power and rainwater is used for harvesting.

Although no longer a working farm, the site is now home to several rescue animals including dogs, donkeys, horses and a pony. Through one of Honeybuns' initiatives, BeeGreen, the company invests in wild life by encouraging employees to get involved in tree-planting, hedge laying and building bird shelters. Wild flowers grow in abundance and around 20 different species of birds are sighted each month on the farm.

Inside the bakery, things are run very much along the slow-food lines. The products, which are made in small batches are baked much more slowly and on a lower heat than that in conventional bakeries, to allow the flavours to mingle and caramelise slowly. The eggs are cracked by hand in the bakery itself - a rare sight nowadays- most bakeries used liquid egg. The business is not certified organic, but Emma will use organic ingredients where they avoid chemical additives, so the gluten-free icing sugar and the maple syrup is organic, and all the ingredients are natural.
"Honeybuns is a very special company and a real pleasure to work with," said Bakery Buyer Jo Skelton. "Emma and Matt are truly committed to sharing wonderful food and creating a real difference in their community. And the Heathcliffe Brownie is utterly scrummy!"

Competition

To celebrate Coeliac Awareness Week, which runs from 11-17 May. Honeybuns is offering two lucky Partners and a guest each the chance to go on a "Honeybuns Bakery Safari" this summer to see how and where the products are made, to meet Emma and her team and also visit some of Honeybuns' local suppliers.

After a welcoming coffee and cake in the Bee Shack, the winners will have a tour of the bakery and will then be taken in a 4x4, to meet some of the local producers who supply Honeybuns. These will include Broad Oak Egg Farm, two miles away, to see the free range hens feeding in the fields, and Filberts Honey Farm in Muckleford, near Dorchester, driving through beautiful Dorset countryside there and back. Lunch will be served in the Bee Shack, with much of the produce supplied by Alweston Post Office, which the winners will also visit to meet the owners Sally and Nick. Then it's back to the Bee Shack for a cookie - making masterclass and a tasting of Honeybuns products. Supper will be in a local pub and the winners will then spend the night in a luxury local B&B, returning home the following morning. Winners will need to cover their travel expenses to and from Sherborne but otherwise Honeybuns promises to totally lavish them with goodies and samples- including a Safari goody-bag to keep.