‘I run my cake business with ingredients I pick from my garden’

Poppy Sayers’ cakes are works of art, and today the artist’s canvas is a magnificent buttercream-covered, three-tiered cake for 150 guests. Featuring mulberry, redcurrant and thyme, all grown near Poppy’s Suffolk home, it’s a memorable tribute to summer’s most bountiful produce.

Poppy started her cake business, The Hazlebury Kitchen, in 2016 after making a four-tier cake for her sister’s wedding. She had known she wanted to do “something outside with food” since she was nine.

She graduated from Leiths Cookery School at 18 and later studied Food Chain Management at the Royal Agricultural University. But Poppy struggled to find her feet and while she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do, she became an estate agent and did some baking on the side.

three-layer buttercream cake decorated with real flowers

A three-tier cake made by Poppy Sayers of Hazlebury Kitchens

Making baking your profession

Poppy credits her “wild childhood” on a farm as inspiration for her use of foraged ingredients. When she wasn’t helping her father herd sheep and cows, she was gathering elderflowers to make cordial and, a few years later, berries and other fruits to brew cider and sloe gin.

Her enthusiasm for baking was sparked by her late grandmother Betty, “a little lady with a neat perm” and a pleated gingham apron, who showed Poppy how to “create magic with just a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon.” Poppy remembers the smell of Betty’s Victoria sponge wafting from the kitchen—a memory that now influences her own baking technique. “I’ve never timed a cake in the oven,” she laughs. “I bake on low, slow speed to keep everything moist, and when I can smell it, I know it’s done.”

Betty, who passed away four years ago, was thrilled when Poppy decided to make baking her career. “She’d say, ‘We started the business together, didn’t we, darling?'” Poppy recalls, adding that she often consults her grandmother’s recipe books and treasures the handwritten notes.

hazlebury kitchens cake is decorated by baker poppy sayers

Seasonal and local ingredients

Poppy is clearly immersed in her art, adding a pink rosebud here and there, a purple pansy there. “Decorating is the best part,” she says. “I just take a deep breath and get started.” Over the years, she’s learned invaluable skills to get her creations just right. During warm spells, for example, she adds a white chocolate ganache coating, which holds up better to heat than buttercream and better protects the structural integrity of a sponge cake stack.

The process of decorating flowers is also affected by temperature. “When I press flowers onto a cake, the buttercream has to be soft enough for them to stick without making a dent,” she says. “When it’s hot, I have to put the cake back in the fridge repeatedly so it doesn’t get too soft.”

These days, feverfew draws its attention from a mix of pressed and freshly picked flowers, including tricolor pansies and geraniums. “When the petals fall off, I dry them and use them as sprinkles,” she says of her sustainable approach. “In the old days, people would bake a pie with whatever was available; if there were blackberries in the hedgerows, they’d put them in.” For a “nostalgic bite,” Poppy might top that blackberry flavor with apples and a drizzle of homemade plum jam.

cakes decorated with wildflowers by poppy sayers of hazlebury kitchen

Poppy’s cakes have starred in weddings and events across East Anglia, London and beyond. She sends samples to her clients in the post and is always open to their ideas, once even incorporating a client’s home-brewed beer into a recipe. Once they’ve agreed on a budget and design, she brings their vision to life by creating a mood board or sketch. She even offers the option of a watercolour version as a keepsake.

“My grandmother taught me to create magic with just a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon”

If a customer asks for a cake with an ingredient that has to be flown in, she often suggests a local, seasonal substitute that tastes better. Her flour is ground at a nearby stone mill, and her mother-in-law, Mandy, keeps chickens to provide fresh eggs. Milk and cream, which she heats with ingredients to impart flavors, are supplied by the milkman. The butter is always British.

Having a vegetable garden rich in fruits, herbs and flowers is an advantage: “I can just walk out in my slippers and grab what I need,” she laughs.

Otherwise, she heads to the Sayers’ smallholding, where her mother, Susie, grows everything from cornflowers to dahlias, which Poppy decorates, as well as berries and vegetables. For her high-summer cakes, she picks raspberries fresh from the vine, bakes them into the batter and “crushes” them into buttercream. Perennials such as sage and mint add aromatic finishing touches.

flowers are pressed as cake decoration for a Hazlebury Kitchen Cake

Poppy presses flowers from her cottage garden to decorate a Hazlebury Kitchen cake

Finding the right moment

Poppy’s husband Henry and her young sons, Rupert, four, and Edmund, almost two, make up her taste-testing panel. “It’s part of the fun, although they’re my biggest critics,” she says. She also hopes to pass on Betty’s love of baking to her children: “I remember the sessions with my grandmother as a loving, nurturing process. She always let me lick the spoon!”

Now, customers across the country can enjoy the fruits of Betty’s wisdom while benefiting from Poppy’s eco-friendly practices. These range from the natural, refillable cleaning products she uses to tidy her workspace to the boxes that protect her cakes as she ships them out. “I encourage people to return them in exchange for a discount on their next order,” she says.

While she longs for her customers to enjoy her cakes, she has admitted one thing. “It’s sad to see them go,” she says, as she boxes up her latest work of art. But there’s no time to mourn: wedding season is here, and Poppy is in demand. It won’t be long before she’s picking the flowers that will adorn her next masterpiece.