GOOD FOOD GUY

WHY IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO FALL IN LOVE WITH CAKE

 Taken from this month’s Cotswold Life magazine

 
 

EVERY NOW AND AGAIN SOMEONE WALKS INTO YOUR LIFE AND CHANGES EVERYTHING

(before you start to wonder if I’ve gone all clichéd and Mills & Boon for February, the month of romance, please bear with me!). This life-changing moment happened a few weeks ago and it wasn’t a someone, it was a something. A chocolate brownie to be precise.

Over the last few months, we’ve been on the hunt for top-notch products to stock in our new Warner’s Supermarket in Upton on Severn which opens this spring (I know, it’s a tough job!). I’m pleased to say we’ve made lots of exciting new discoveries, but the one that blew me away most recently was the chocolate brownies from Beau’s Bakehouse.

Now I was pretty sure you couldn’t beat a proper home-made brownie, you know, the sort where it’s more chocolate than anything else, but I was wrong. This was gooey on the inside, crisp on the outside, and the sort of brownie that makes you want to share it with everyone you love, in a desperate ‘OMG you’ve got to taste this’ kind of way.

Of course, I couldn’t just stop there – I had to make sure their other products were equally up to scratch, and I’m pleased to report that Beau’s Bakehouse didn’t disappoint on any front. That was the moment I realised there was something genuinely special here, so much so, that I felt I had to dedicate this month’s column to them.

Beau’s Bakehouse is a small bakery in Frampton-on-Severn, run by Jacqui Cowper-Smith, whose love of baking comes from her New Zealand-born grandmother, Beau. Jacqui started out selling shortcakes, made to her grandmother’s recipe, and other bakes at farmers’ markets in 2008 and slowly grew the business from there.

There is only a small workforce at Beau’s Bakehouse, which consists of home-bakers, students and part-time staff, but they all have one thing in common – they love baking cakes. As Jacqui rightly says, ‘nothing beats a freshly baked cake’ and every cake is baked and delivered fresh that day (or the next day if there is an unusually high demand). Everything is handmade from scratch in small batches – that includes the curd for the lemon curd shortcakes, the caramel for the caramel shortcakes and all the cake batters and mixes ­– and all using local ingredients where possible.

It would be far easier for Jacqui to buy in powdered mixes or ready-made fillings, but that would go against the Beau’s Bakehouse ethos. As she says, ‘you can’t beat the satisfaction of taking a sponge out of the oven knowing you’ve made it’. And with head baker Liz sometimes turning out up to 80 sponges in a day, that’s a whole lot of satisfaction going on!

But it's this personal quality to the baking that somehow filters through to the end product – just like with a home-baked cake, the finished product might not always look perfect, but we all know it’s what’s on the inside that counts, don’t we?

BEAU’S BAKEHOUSE BEST BAKES:

CARAMEL SHORTCAKE

If you’ve ever made this rich and indulgent tea-time treat you’ll know what a labour of love it is. There are no shortcuts here – a thick layer of good quality Belgian chocolate on top, Jacqui’s signature shortcake recipe for the base, but it’s the middle layer that really sets these apart ­– a gooey caramel of the consistency you can only get from hours of painstaking stirring by hand.

CHOCOLATE BROWNIES

Not all brownies are equal but what is it that makes some brownies so mouth-wateringly good? It all comes down to getting the consistency right, which can only be achieved by not skimping on ingredients. Made from 70% chocolate, these are just the right side of squidgy – the sort of brownie you wish you could make at home. No wonder they are Beau’s Bakehouse’s bestselling items.

CARROT CAKE

Moist, creamy, and bursting with flavour, this cake is the one that attracts the most comments from customers. It’s also the cake that launched Beau’s Bakehouse into Gloucester Services on the M5, so has rather a special place in Jacqui’s recipe book. It is a dense, fruity cake, chockful of grated carrot and walnuts and topped with a generous layer of zesty cream cheese frosting.