With her meringues now on sale in Harvey Nichols and her Cheshire Tarts patisserie tickling local tastebuds, success for Wilmslow-based Angela Kapoor is sweet.
As a whole slew of TV programmes have shown us, it takes time and dedication to perfect the baker’s art.
So in kick-starting her Cheshire Tarts patissserie business, Angela Kapoor thought nothing of allowing herself only two hours sleep the night before an artisan market, working through the wee small hours to ensure her wares were as fresh as possible.
‘The hours are extremely long,’ says Angela, aged 32, from Wilmslow, who is married with a four-year-old daughter. ‘Probably a lot longer than I was working for a commercial law firm. But it’s my enterprise, so I know what I’m going for.’
Yes, Angela came to the world of baking by an unusual career path, having worked as a commercial lawyer for the likes of Eversheds and DLA Piper.
‘I just decided when I had my little girl that I’d like to set up my own business,’ says Angela, who also launched the Ladies’ Legal Network - a support and social group for female lawyers.
‘Good food and drink have always been a great passion of mine, and during holidays to Brittany and Normandy I longed to re-create the traditional bread and patisserie goods that are so much a part of French life.
‘I enjoyed making patisserie products, like frangipane tarts. apple tarts - all the kind of things you might see if you went on a holiday in northern France. I had in mind the kind of things we don’t have in England. We have English confectioners, but that’s a very different thing from French-style artisan boulangerie and patisserie.
‘It’s something I’ve done as a hobby, but then these artisan markets started becoming quite successful - the Treacle Market in Macclesfield and the Wilmslow Artisan Market - and there was an outlet for my products and a customer base. I thought, let’s give it a go.’
Angela is a self-taught baker, and Cheshire Tarts started out as a one-woman concern in the kitchen of her Wilmslow home.
‘I very quickly established what I needed to do to have an offering that was attractive both to retail customers, through the markets, but also, importantly, wholesale customers,’ she says. ‘We’re just growing our little wholesale business at the moment.
‘I decided I needed commercial premises to bake from, so I took a lease on premises in Wilmslow.’
Those premises are The Wilmslow Bakery, a light industrial unit off Hawthorn Lane. The one-time cottage industry now has two full-time staff, including a bread specialist, and 18 part-time casual workers.
‘We’ve gone from a kitchen at home no bigger than 10ft by 10ft to a unit of 1,400sq ft. There’s plenty of room for us to grow,’ says Angela.
One big step in that growth came with Harvey Nichols’ decision to stock Cheshire Tarts’ meringues in its Manchester store. And that’s not the only illustrious retail name interested in Angela’s wares.
‘Selfridges in London has asked us to work on a range of eclairs for their Manchester store,’ she confides.
Cheshire Tarts’ products can also be found at the Hollies farm shop, Little Budworth, and the Artisan Meat Company, Mottram St Andrew. The next step is likely to be a Cheshire Tarts retail outlet. But Angela does not see the brand aiming for a place on the shelves of big supermarkets across the country.
‘The whole ethos behind our business is high-quality fresh artisan patisserie, so that means baked in the way you’d make it at home,’ she explains. ‘To get your products into bigger retailers, you’d need to increase the shelf life considerably. The only way you could do that is by adding artificial preservatives. That would change the whole nature of our products and ethos of our business.’
