Chris Rundle meets the woman who won’t allow her successful bakery business to grow too large. Pictures by Steve Roberts.

If profit was the only thing she was interested in, Emma Goss-Custard could take the brakes off her business tomorrow. The orders from new customers would come flooding in, and before long the entire enterprise would be operating on a vastly bigger scale.

But having made her reputation by being the next best thing to a cottage industry. Emma is not about to throw it away. So while Honeybuns, her Dorset-based bakery, may see some modest expansion, it will all be quite severely controlled.

“We are going for sustainable growth,” she says. “We have to decide how much growth we want to strive for and aim for that: if we got too big for our boots the product would suffer. We want to hit the sweet spot in terms of size, sustainability and quality.

An impressive philosophy-though one shared by many smaller specialist producers who take the same degree of pride as Emma in what they do. But, after all, it’s quality that has brought Honeybuns its starting success since Emma moved the operation to Dorset form Guildford, to take advantage of the cornucopia of first-class local ingredients.

If you’ve patronised any John Lewis restaurant you will probably have noticed, and eaten, the Honeybuns products: those cakes that look as though they have just emerged from a farmhouse oven.

Definitely not an industrial product, and almost certainly homemade.

Well, neither, really. What Emma and Husband Matt have achieved is a bakery business that is big enough to be a commercial success but small enough to retain that individual appearance of all its products.

On one wall of the company headquarters at Naish Farm, in Holwell near Sherborne, hangs a bicycle- the one Emma used to pedal around Oxford delivering the cakes she made in her student digs. Her original inspiration came from her mother’s baking, and even today there’s a strong feeling of family tradition being upheld here.

“We can and need to do volume, but it is all relative,” she says. “Probably a lot of commercial bakeries would think six pallets a week was peanuts, yet it is considerably more than a village bakery would do. And there are still faces and real people involved in our products rather than numbers and machines.

“Nothing is squidged out of a pipe here: we use the same processes people do at home. Of course we have machinery- we use mixers. But in the same way as at home you would measure out ingredients, put them in a mixer then put the mix into a tin and bake it, we do the same, only using bigger mixes.

“One or two people are responsible for each batch, so they weigh, mix, put in a tin, put the tin in the oven and take it out; so they can sign the whole thing off.

“That’s how we avoid uniformity, that and the fact that we use a second-hand bread oven which was different characteristics of cooking at each of its levels, which means we have to keep swivelling the products round to get them to cook properly.”

Honeybuns was already prospering when it was based in Surrey, thanks to Emma’s simple technique of stripping a standard cake or confection down to basics and rebuilding it using only the best ingredients, with price never a factor in the equation.

“But our big problem was getting the right quality ingredients. What local products there were, were expensive and they really weren’t that many at all,” she says.

“Because of our belief in using the best things we decided to move to where they were produced. And down here we are spoiled for choice: there are so many more people producing. And the longer we are here, the more impressed we are with what we find.”

Regular suppliers range from Denhay Farms, which provides the butter, to nearby Willow Farm, which delivers the free- range eggs, to a retired GP who has become Honeybuns source of heather honey.

“You have to have a nice, sustainable relationship with an individual who comes to the back door with his buckets,” says Emma. “If he’s about to move the bees he tells me, and we discuss how we’re going to source heather honey from somewhere else- it has such a wonderful, rich flavour. Relationships with suppliers don’t get much closer than that.”

With its output heavily influenced by the baking of southern France, Honeybuns has relied less then most on wheat flour; substituting ground hazelnuts, almonds and polenta, with the result that people with gluten intolerance have been among its most enthusiastic customers.

“In fact, we have been getting such a response from people who could not eat wheat flour, as well as from those who could, that we have decided to go wheat free,” Emma says.

“It’s going to make life easier: at the moment we only do wheat- free baking on certain days and although we use gluten-free baking powder and gluten-free chocolate, there’s always the headache of cross contamination.

“But from the end of September there will be no wheat flour on the premises- and that’s going to be a huge relief.