EVERYTHING seems sweet about Honeybuns, not just their cakes. Their Naish Farm site in Holwell, near Sherborne, looks a picture perfect sight with buildings painted in pastels and white, old bikes propped up against walls and a converted beehive for the postbox.

Inside their Bee Shack, a caf-cum-staff room, pink fluffy parasols stand above the tables. Sugary smells emanate from the bakery, working at full steam coping with ever-increasing orders. Reclaimed railway sleepers sit stacked to one end of the farm, waiting to be used for herb beds, for the launch of their new savoury lines early next year.

Honeybuns cakes are everywhere - from top-notch London foodhalls to local farm shops. After a glimpse of the bakery and a taste of their cakes with names such as Coppice Cake, Moosh Bar and Snowy Hills, the reason behind their wide appeal becomes clear.

It is a far cry from the company's humble beginnings. Founder Emma Goss-Custard would make cakes late into the night in a tiny shared kitchen at her university digs in Oxford, where she was studying a PGCE to become a teacher.

"Teaching wasn't for me," said Emma, 34. "I had qualified and shockingly realised almost from day one that it wasn't for me. I was scratching my head thinking about what I was going to do.

"There was only one tutor who didn't try to persuade me to do it and her husband was a Croatian refugee who had started a patisserie in Oxford. Because I like food and cooking she suggested I work for her husband in the holidays. It was a great experience and incredibly inspiring."

Working at the patisserie complemented Emma's own background with her mother and grandmother both being keen bakers. She decided to "give it a go", bought an old post office bike and with a friend managed to persuade Sir Tony Blackwell, the bookshop magnate, to open up a sandwich outlet in his warehouse.

"That was good fun," remembered Emma, "but we were never going to make any money out of it. I think it's fair to say we gave away more than we sold. We were too carried away with the idea of feeding people."

Emma and her friend decided to go their separate ways and she was back out on her bike delivering sandwiches and cakes all around Oxford. The cakes Emma had been brought up on were made with recipes based on those from Provence and Italy, using a lot of polenta and ground nuts such as almonds and hazelnuts. No wheat flour was used and so without knowing it, she was on to a good thing.

"I always thought the cakes were nice when I was growing up but I never thought that it would be useful from a gluten-free point of view. I had to research it to make the recipes successful. We had to change the tack of the whole business, it gave me a whole new niche."

Emma began using a friend's kitchen for more space, cycling there with her mother's trusty Kenwood mixer in her rucksack. She began to pick up customers, including the Croatian patisserie owner and another friend who had three sandwich outlets, and then quite a lot of other delis followed suit", said Emma.

She was baking and selling 1,000 cakes a week at this point. As well as unintentionally being well ahead in the trend for gluten-free food she had always baked with the best ingredients she could get her hands on - free-range eggs, farmhouse butter and honey.

After meeting her husband-to-be Matt, Emma followed him to Guildford but kept her clients in Oxford - by this point she had learned to drive. She enlisted the help of another friend and doubled their turnover.

Eventually, after more hard work that included catching 20-minute naps every night to keep up with orders, Emma was in a position to move.

She had always fancied the idea of retiring to the country and keeping rescue animals and by this time she and Matt were married.

"I thought, why not bring that dream forward by a couple of decades?"

Emma and Matt moved to Naish Farm in 2003 and since then their business has really taken off.

They still have their commitment to local products - the free-range eggs come from down the road at Bishop's Down, butter from Denhay in Bridport and their honey from a local retired GP.

The site's previous incarnation as a farm is still evident throughout - in some cases it makes life difficult as the team has to navigate through crooked walls and split-level flooring. The Bee Shack, which is open to the public on the first Sunday of every month, used to be the chicken shed. Outside, an old shipping container is used for storage.

Part of the bakery used to be the milking parlour and inside people were busy cutting up trays of their delicious Congo Bar, a polenta shortbread base topped with caramel, coconut curls, Belgian chocolate and pecan nuts.

Unusually for a businessperson Emma acknowledges the fact Honeybuns' products are more expensive than your average cake, but it is easily justifiable. Not only are the ingredients either local or as good as possible if not - such as their organic maple syrup - but they are cooked in a way that Emma believes sets them apart from most competition.

Standing near the oven that was busy cooking their cranberry and pecan flapjacks, she said: "This is our old school oven. It's brilliant because it gives top and bottom heat. It's quite an uneven bake and it takes quite a lot of skill to maintain because you need to know where the hot spots are.

"It would be a lot easier to use a revolving oven system, but with this I think it adds quality to the produce.

"Our flapjacks are baked for 47 minutes, whereas commercially it is very often only 10 minutes. Baking it for longer allows all the flavours to soak in. the butter gets absorbed and has an almost caramelised effect on the bottom."

Using polenta in their recipes means that many of the products are loosely based around classic recipes but made in their own quirky way.

Their almond moon', for instance, is based on a bakewell tart but made with cranberries. Their Scrumdiddleyumptious cookie is a real surprise, a delicious combination of lemon and ginger in a slightly crunchy yet gooey cookie.

It's little wonder it won gold at the Great Taste Awards this year.

The future is looking bright for Honeybuns. They are hoping to make their bakery even greener by implementing changes like ordering in more ingredients at a time to reduce the amount of traffic coming to and from the site. Business is booming, with these last couple of months being their busiest yet and if taste is anything to go by, things will only get sweeter.