Success is a piece of cake

10:50am Monday 30th June 2008

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NICOLA RAYNER is sweetened up by a village cakemaker of some repute

LIKE Little Britain's Marjorie Dawes - the terrifying leader of Fat Fighters - I love a bit of cake. Don't we all? A cup of tea and a bit of cake is a very British pleasure.

So it is with a spring in my step that I visit Debbie Horne in her Portesham home to chat about her cake business and her newest customer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

We chat in her office', an immaculate, sun-filled kitchen that looks out on to fields and the sea beyond.

"It's been going for a year and a half," she says of her business, Cakes by Debbie Horne, "I started doing them for the local shop down in Abbotsbury.

"I used to do lots of wedding and celebration cakes and I said to the shop, could I advertise and they asked if I cooked cakes like Dorset apple.

Now Debbie - who is impressively slim for someone who makes cakes all day - has five contracts. She supplies Modbury Farm Shop, The Old Coastguards in Abbotsbury where guests in the cottages can order a cake, Sladers Yard in West Bay, Bowdens Local whence you can order one to be delivered to your door and, now, the River Cottage empire.

"The restaurant manager or assistant restaurant manager tried a cake at Sladers Yard," explains Debbie. "Then the head chef Tim called and I took some samples down - this is in Axminster - for his local produce store. So I started doing them for the canteen, for the actual café there, about a month ago and this week I started doing them for the shop as well."

Was she nervous?

"I was because I thought when I took my samples down there that they would not go for them. It's such a big name and I'm really basic and a one-woman band.

"I thought to myself, it's coffee and walnut and chocolate cake'.

But it's really hard to come by good homemade cakes. Also I think the packaging plays a part - it's simple packaging with no gimmicks."

Debbie's one-woman band fits perfectly with the River Cottage ethos and, of course, freshly homemade cakes taste so much better than anything you can buy in the supermarket. Debbie cuts me a generous slice of her popular chocolate fudge cake to go with my cup of tea and we chat about her background in baking.

"I trained at Cassio College in Watford," she says, " we learned the baking side of things. We had a masterchef teaching us; I guess I fell in love with it then but I had started baking cakes long before that with my mum. Cake making started off as a hobby. I've got lots of books and I started from there. I made a wedding cake for a friend with all the sugar flowering.

"For this kind of cake," she gestures at the chocolate cake, now almost gone, "you've got to be quite precise. But the celebration and wedding cakes can be quite personal and you can do your own take on it."

Just this week Debbie has 100 cakes to bake. Her repertoire includes Dorset apple; bara brith, a fruity tea bread; chocolate fudge; lemon syrup; coffee and walnut; and carrot and orange.

"I do some fruit cakes as well," she adds, "but I try to keep it to about six different cakes."

Debbie can bake 12 cakes in one batch in her oven.

"I like to get three batches done a day," she says. "Thursdays are normally spent packaging them up for delivery on Friday morning."

Does she still enjoy it?

"I still get satisfaction out of it. It's hard work and it's long work. I really like Friday when they fill the back of my car to the brim and I go and deliver them. I enjoy putting a smile on people's faces."

It is easy to see why people smile when Debbie arrives with her cakes. The chocolate cake I try is so moist, so rich, so chocolaty, that it is like the Platonic ideal of what a chocolate cake should taste like.

I wonder if Debbie protects her recipes with her life?

"No," she says. "A couple of people have asked for recipes and I've let them have them - it's people who want to make them for themselves.

"It's to encourage people to bake as a really pleasurable pastime."

Debbie has developed her recipes over time. Of her Dorset apple cake, she says: "This is my variation. I've tinkered with a few of them, but it is a mixture of two recipes."

As for ingredients, she says: "I try and use the best that I can but I try and keep it fairly simple and do what I'm doing well.

"Baking is not hard - you just need a little bit of time and confidence."

Like her mother, Debbie spends time in the kitchen with her daughters Alysha, four, and Emilie, two: "It's relaxing, something they like to do."

To order one of Debbie's cakes, visit www.bowdenslocal.co.uk