New cake shop Bake Away opens in Norwich this weekend selling modern and nostalgic cakes, cookies and traybakes.
School dinners. You either look back on them with rose-tinted glasses….or shudder at the memory of soggy fishfingers, lumpy mash and mystery meat pies. But one thing that unites most of us is our fondness for those unforgettable desserts. Setting the 'pondy' concoction that was tapioca aside, schoolday treats were the best. Chocolate crunch so thick it threatened to break your teeth - until, of course, you doused it in chocolate or 'pink' custard. Sponge cake with icing and sprinkles. Roly poly. Arctic roll. The list goes on.
A couple from Norwich is looking to evoke those memories with their cookies and cakes, some of them revived recipes from their own time at school.
Nikita and Terry Pegler, who launched Bake Away from their home in 2017, are set to open their first shop on Sprowston Road in the city next weekend (September 28), opposite The Brickmakers pub. Amazingly, this will be just one month since they first set their eyes on the premises.
Typically the shop will have around eight to 10 types of freshly made cut cakes, brownies, blondies, tray bakes and more, prepared from scratch by Terry every day, with drip cakes (Terry's speciality) made to order to collect from the premises. But as well as snazzy things, the couple say they won't forget their roots.
"What we started out with," says Nikita, "is those old school traybakes. That's what we're known for…things like cornflake tarts. Things from school dinners. Noone else was making them in the area so when we started selling those it went manic. Our best seller is toffee cream tart. That's a pastry base with toffee cream and chocolate on top. Schools in Norfolk used to have it. And there's the chocolate oatie. It's a chocolate oat base with a chocolate topping - that's so nostalgic. Other things we'll have are stuffed cookies, my husband puts things like Biscoff pieces and Biscoff sauce inside and when you break them in half they're divine. And a favourite is our white rocky road. That's extremely, extremely popular."
Nikita and Terry set up Bake Away nearly two years ago, with Terry giving up his job in late 2018 to concentrate on the business full time. "It all started," says Nikita, "when he was asked by a friend to make a birthday cake and we made our first ever signature drip cake. It just went from there. She said we should advertise and start making them for other people and we went from there to doing this for a living. Our speciality for celebration cakes is buttercream drip cakes not fondant. We buy in special toppers if people want a certain theme or character. In the shop we'll have our catalogue for people to look through and they can pre-order large cakes and cutting cakes and we do treat boxes as well."
Bake Away will be open from 10am to 4pm on its launch day, followed by regular hours of 9.30am to 4.30pm.
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