Fiona Griffiths visits Honeybuns bakery, which has grown from small beginnings into a thriving business

Seven years ago Emma Goss-Custard was a penniless student, baking cakes in her spare time and selling them to delicatessens and cafes to help fund her studies at Oxford University.

Today, 32-year-old Emma is still baking and selling her cakes and biscuits - but with the help of her husband Matthew and their 22 staff at Honeybuns bakery in Sherborne.

Right from the beginning Emma baked gluten-free cakes using recipes handed down by her mother and grandmother. She didn't make a conscious decision to specialise in gluten-free cakes, but as the years have gone by and wheat intolerance and coeliac disease have become more common, Emma has found herself at the forefront of a rapidly growing market.

She explains: "I started out as a student baking cakes for fun during the holidays, and then I bought an old Post Office bike and started delivering them to delicatessens and cafes around Oxford to make some extra money for my studies.

"I had no money at all so it was a case of buying the bike for £50 and then waiting a couple of weeks to buy my basket.

"My mum was a very good Aga baker and she had a real interest in French and Italian baking, which just happened to be gluten-free because it used polenta and ground almonds instead of flour. I inherited these recipes from my mum and granny and then I had a lot of fun tweaking them and thinking up new combinations."

After she married, Emma moved with Matthew, 36, to his cottage in Guildford, and continued baking cakes in the tiny kitchen there. "I was still making things on my own with two Kenwood mixers, and driving back to my Oxford customers twice a week with my car filled with cakes," she recalls. "Even back in my Oxford days I was very focused on sourcing local ingredients, so I was using local free-range eggs and farmhouse butter, which seven years ago was quite revolutionary. Generally cakes were mass-produced by machine and contained hydrogenated oils.

"A lot of people at the time were telling me it wouldn't work because I didn't use preseratives and my cakes were perceived as being an expensive luxury. But I refused to believe that and look where I am now." Emma and Matthew both grew up in the countryside - Matthew is originally from Dorset - and they were keen to "breathe life back into an old farm". So in 2002 the couple bought Naish Farm in Holwell, near Sherborne, and made it their home as well as converting an old barn into a bakery.

Six months ago Matthew gave up his job in computer programming to work full time looking after the admin side of the business.

Although Honeybuns now employs 22 people, there's no production line at the bakery and all the cakes are still made in small batches, with one person responsible for each product from beginning to end.

There are now 15 cakes in the range, which will be entirely gluten-free by the end of the year.

Among the most popular products are the milk chocolate brownie; the cranberry, pecan and maple syrup flapjack; the Congo Bar (shortbread and toffee topped with pecans, chocolate and organic coconut); and the newly launched Almond Moon (polenta shortbread topped with almond frangipane, cranberries and chunks of toasted almond).

Emma is always working on developing new products, and in September she'll be launching the Chockabloc - a gluten and wheat-free Valrhona chocolate dessert which is "like a very, very posh refrigerator cake".

The range has won many prizes - including Supreme Champion at the Great Taste Awards - and Honeybuns even trains patisserie chefs from John Lewis department stores in gluten-free baking.

Emma says: "A lot of people claim to use local ingredients but we feel we are pretty genuine when we say that. Our eggs come from two miles away and we use butter from Denhay Farms in Bridport. "All the pecan nuts and cranberries we get from a wholesaler based two-and-a-half miles away, and even our labelling; brochures and packaging are done locally so we don't go far afield for anything."

Honeybuns' products are available from independent stores and cafes, farm shops and delicatessens around the country, including Beales in Bournemouth, the Golden Acres tearoom in West Parley, Stewarts Garden Centre in Christchurch, and Del Marco coffee shop in Bournemouth.

And Emma says they're not just for people who can't eat wheat or gluten. "We haven't deliberately gone for gluten-free, but from the beginning we were interested in not using flour because we wanted a more luxury type of cake.

"So we were using mainly gluten-free ingredients but then we had so many people coming up and saying 'if you only switched to gluten-free baking powder or changed that ingredient, I could eat that'.

"Now our products are entirely gluten-free, but the gluten-free packaging is quite subtle so as not to put anybody off who doesn't understand what gluten-free or coeliac is.

"The intention is for everybody to enjoy it, whether they've got an intolerance or allergy or not."

Emma's next venture is to put her university teaching degree to good use by running a series of gluten-free baking courses at Honeybuns, when people can learn about the slightly more complex process of making cakes with ingredients like polenta and ground almonds instead of flour.

The course costs £85 each - to include morning coffee and cakes, lunch, recipes, and a basket of goodies to take away - and places are still available for June 18, July 9 and July 23.