About Us
We make incredibly tasty cakes, traybakes and #fudgingdelicious brownies from our kitchen in an Old Match Factory in Gloucester. You can try our cakes from our online shop at our Cake Hatch, at one of our markets or through one of the coffee shops and farm shops we supply.
What makes us different? Well, like a good recipe, we believe it’s a combination of special ingredients that combine to make the magic happen:
Carefully Sourced Ingredients
We are pretty lucky to live in Gloucestershire, to borrow a line from the packaging of our local butter supplier Netherend Farm ‘The richest dairy pastures lie… Betwixt the Severn and the Wye’. It really is a fantastic area for produce, and we are proud to support local artisans such as Netherend farm and Shipton Mill flour. We also make sure our egg’s are free range and our sugar is fair trade. If you want cakes that taste great, they have to be made with great produce by people who care about what they make.
Our Brownie Wizards really are magic!
We’ve worked really hard to find a team of cake loving bakers that are as fanatical as Hetty at making really delicious cakes. If you don’t love what you do it makes a difference. It’s why your Granny’s fairy cakes always taste so good, because she cares about the people who are eating it.
We believe flavour comes first
We believe if it doesn’t taste amazing, why bother?! We all know cakes aren’t health food, they are feel good food. So if it doesn’t make you feel good, what is the point? That’s why we are passionate about finding really fantastic recipes. We don’t believe in cutting corners, we make our own caramels, we don’t skimp on fillings, we don’t do style over substance, we don’t penny pinch if it means compromising on flavour or quality. We want to be the stuff of your dreams! And WE want to FEEL GOOD about what we make for YOU!!
Hetty is a special kind of nuts
It takes a unique kind of weirdo to build a business like this. No normal person has sleepless nights over whether they put enough lemon zest in a cake, or whether that meringue will be just the right amount of crispy vs chewy. But it’s this level of obsessive passion that meant building Hetty’s Kitchen was the only way to go.
1. Both sides of Hetty’s Grandparents are from a farming background.
This is one of the reasons why using great produce is so important to her, she knows that if she ever even considered opening a pack of marge instead of butter, Hetty’s Ganka (who was a dairy farmer) would turn in his grave!
2. She is incapable of holding down normal employment.
After working for: the local Newsagents, Lush, Topshop, Benefit Cosmetics, TGI Fridays, Guide Dogs for the Blind, Riding for the Disabled and Young Enterprise all before the age of 25, Hetty started to realise that maybe a normal job wasn’t for her. Hetty reluctantly realised that she wasn’t a particularly good employee, and it took her last manager to point out that if Hetty wasn’t furiously passionate about something, it couldn’t hold her attention for long. The only job or even hobby Hetty had ever stuck at for long was baking.
3. Hetty was the only one she knew who took cake tins to Uni.
What normal student takes baking equipment on their Textiles and Art degree, the space that took up could have housed valuable alcohol smuggled from her parents secret stash. But Hetty would choose cakes over her mothers dodgy looking bottle of Blue Curaçao any day.
4. She told a bare faced lie to get her 1st market pitch.
Upon a phone screening application, Hetty was told that the market at Gloucester Docks already had a cake person and they didn’t need another, unless she could offer something different ‘um… I can make cake pops, they are going to be the new cupcakes!’ Hetty said (after only reading about them earlier that day!) Hetty quickly learnt how to do these, but only sold them until the vacancy for a cake stall came back up. But it was the foot in the door she needed!
5. She got the keys to her 1st kitchen (that wasn’t from home) just 1 month before she gave birth to her 1st daughter.
When Hetty fell pregnant with her daughter she realised that being the only one keeping her business running, that it might not be possible to continue once the baby arrived… unless she could grow it enough to take on some extra help and a commercial kitchen before the due date. It was make or break. But with the help of very supportive customers and new team, it came together, only just in time!
Yep… definitely takes a special kind of nuts!
