Exceedingly Good Cherry Bakewells

It's been exactly three weeks today since our new bakery opened on Clwyd Street. The managers are from Melin y Wig. The honeymoon period is over but there are still queues within and they even spill outside the premises. That would suggest someone is doing something right. 

So, who's suffering as a result? Other than the obvious three supermarkets, there are two competitors. Well Street's Chatwin's model has changed. No longer is it serving such a wide range of patisserie products such as gateaux and cakes. Instead, these days it's more of a hot food and sandwich takeaway and café. The Bake House on Lôn Parcwr is more of a direct rival but it also sells a wider range of non-bakery goods. It's also a spacious place to bake and convenient for motorists to visit but isn't in the town centre. 

Back to Rhuthun/Ruthin's Becws Islyn, prices are higher than at a supermarket but are not dissimilar to Chatwin's. But, what of the taste? The bread we've bought was no better or indeed worse than our other two bakeries. The egg custards were fine with no over-egginess (compare these to Mold's Gerrard's: yuck). Though the icing on the top of Becws Islyn's cherry bakewells was far too hard, brittle even, the flavour was by far the best we've tasted. Exceedingly good, in fact. And, we're some sort of experts as regards cherry bakewells. Roll over Mr Kipling.  

What we don't yet know is whether Becws Islyn bakes from scratch (called 'scratch baking' in the trade, not surprisingly); or whether they do what most supermarkets tend to do: receive deliveries of unbaked or part-baked goods to bake and finish on the premises (called bake-off. Where have we heard that before?). We'd suggest that a small number of pre-wrapped products are common to the other three branches of Becws Islyn and are therefore trunked in.