Whether you like puff or shortcrust pastry,
fruit or nut-filled,
us Brits LOVE our sweet pies and tarts.
We tuck into over ten million of them every week.
Spending more than £125 million each year.
Everyone's got their favourite.
Do you know what, Gregg?
I LOVE a Cherry Bakewell.
Well, you're in luck...
..cos that's exactly what they make in this huge factory!
I'm Gregg Wallace.
I've got cherries!
This time, I'm unpacking the production secrets of these tiny tarts.
I can't believe that you actually bake the whole thing in its tin,
and now you put the icing on once it's in the plastic.
Don't tell me...you put the cherry on once you've got
it inside the box!
I'm Cherry Healey...
Oh, look at that!
..and I'm learning how to swerve a soggy bottom in my home baking.
Ideally, you want between three and five millimetres.
I don't want to sound like I'm not committed...
..but I don't often have a ruler in the kitchen to measure pastry.
And historian Ruth Goodman is sniffing out the origins of
the fragrant filling that gives Bakewell tarts their heart.
Ooh, a lovely new pair of red gloves!
But what on earth has that got to do with frangipane?
In the next 24 hours,
this factory will produce over a quarter of a million Cherry Bakewells.
Getting through over five tonnes of pastry.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Premier Foods factory in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.
This ten-acre site produces over 50 tonnes of baked goods every day.
That includes iced slices, fruit cakes and pies.
But we're following production of one of their best sellers...
..the Mr Kipling Cherry Bakewell.
Production begins with a delivery of flour.
Three times a week,
a lorry does an articulated dance to manoeuvre into position.
Greeting it is production manager Mark Burnett.
Hi, Gregg. Mark. Pleased to meet you. Gregg.
How much flour on a truck? 27 metric tonnes.
What pastry is in a Bakewell tart?
It's a shortcrust pastry.
Anything particular about this flour for the shortcrust?
Yeah, it's a low protein flour. Right.
High protein flour is more suitable for bread.
How many tarts are you likely to make today?
Over a quarter of a million.
I want to see this. Be my guest.
Can I just say...?
I really like that bald head and glasses look, Mark.
Thank you.
Enough larking about...
..these Bakewells won't make themselves.
We need to get the flour off the lorry.
Right, which one? It's the green button. The one...
The green one that says "start filling", right? That's the one.
I was never that bright. Can I?
Yeah.
The clock is ticking,
as compressed air pushes our flour up into the 17-metre-high silos.
From there, it's pumped directly into the mixing bay...
..where the appropriately named Paul Baker is the mixing manager.
He's going to turn it into light, crumbly shortcrust pastry.
Paul. Hiya. Nice to meet you.
Tell me, what is the "short" in shortcrust?
Why does it make it short?
The "short" is about keeping the protein chains within the pastry
literally short to stop it being tough.
How does that work? Would you mind telling me?
I've got no idea how that works.
OK, so when...
If you use a higher proportion of fat to flour,
it wraps all the flour particles up in fat, so they can't
all get together and make a stringy, gooey mess. Simple.
Right. No-one's ever explained that to me.
Oh, OK. That's what it is?
Yeah.
Swerving this stringy disaster zone requires computerised precision.
The recipe for Cherry Bakewells' pastry is number eight,
so you press eight...
..and now that should start putting ingredients in the mixing bowl.
Right, what's going in there first?
That's the margarine going into the bottom of the bowl.
40 kilograms of margarine are automatically dropped in.
Made from vegetable oil, it's very similar to the stuff
you'd buy at the supermarket,
just without its familiar yellow colouring.
What is that sitting on?
That is a weigh scale.
So the recipe - let's say it wants 96 kilos of flour - it waits till
the scales has read off 96 kilos, and then it stops.
Like at home, we would tip in the bag and look at the reading... Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
..the computer's doing the same thing? The same thing.
I love this!
On top of our margarine goes 13.5 kilograms of sugar,
followed by 13 litres of water.
The computer is also controlling the temperature,
making sure the margarine is soft enough to mix properly with the flour.
We try and sort of hit a pastry temperature of around 25,
which is the optimum temperature for the fat to work.
So, the computer also takes the temperature of all these
bulk ingredients, does a clever little calculation, and then blends
hot and cold water to try and keep it around the 24, 25 degree mark.
Genius. Yeah. Absolute genius.
The flour's gone in now. 96 kilos of flour, yeah.
So the weight we've got there now is...?
It'll be around 165 kilos.
This super-sized mix will make enough pastry for 7,500 Cherry Bakewells...
..but it's not quite ready yet.
We add 600g of salt,
followed by 160g of baking powder.
You would normally put this baking powder in something
that you wanted to rise.
Yes. But what we're doing is using the baking powder to open up
the pastry texture to allow the moisture to drive out,
to allow it to bake quicker.
Not enough to let the pastry rise?
No, no, no, no. But enough to open it up?
Absolutely.
Ingredients complete, we can mix them together.
Two hydraulic arms lift our mixing bowl off the floor and into position.
All the way up? Yeah, yeah.
It'll take just 90 seconds to combine all seven ingredients
into soft, crumbly shortcrust.
While my pastry's getting a good workout,
Ruth is checking out the history of these cherry-topped tarts.
And she reckoned it was a good bet to start in the Derbyshire town
that gave them their name - Bakewell.
This place is packed with bakeries...
..but there's something strange going on.
It's funny. All these Bakewells in all these bakery windows,
and none of them have icing on.
And they certainly don't have a cherry on top.
I may be in Bakewell,
but I can't see a Cherry Bakewell anywhere.
Morning! Morning.
Have you got any Cherry Bakewells?
HE SIGHS DEEPLY
We're actually famous for our Bakewell puddings, rather than our Cherry Bakewells.
Oh, is there a difference?
Oh, yeah. it's quite a significant difference.
The puddings, actually, the sort of locals' product,
it's got a similar sweet, almondy flavour
and a layer of strawberry jam at the bottom, like your Bakewell tart,
but no flour. So rather than rising up like a sponge,
it kind of sinks into a rich, gooey, decadent, almondy,
sort of egg custard mixture.
It's actually the one that's made in the town,
and it's the one that the town's famous for.
I'm hoping that investigating the origins of the pudding
will help lead me to the cherry-topped version.
Oh, there's another one!
We just keep passing places selling Bakewell puddings.
I've enlisted the help of food historian Regula Ysewijn.
I mean, how did the pudding and the town get so closely entwined?
Well, we're heading to the Rutland Arms.
And the story goes that a member of staff was ordered to make puddings,
and she misread the recipe
and, by mistake, invented the Bakewell pudding.
Just got it wrong, and something edible came out of it? Exactly.
She thought, "Well, this is nice."
"We'll just call it a Bakewell pudding."
And that's how Bakewell got full of Bakewell puddings.
When would this have been? Around 1851-1857, in between that time.
What a great story. Yeah.
Is it true?
Mm...
..it's not that easy.
It's not that simple.
Regula has found evidence suggesting that something very like
a Bakewell pudding was being made and eaten all around Britain
well before this date.
There is a recipe in this book - The Compleat Housewife.
It was written in 1727.
So, that's a full century earlier.
The only difference is it's called a sweet-meat pudding here,
but if you look at the ingredients and the method,
it's exactly the same as a Bakewell pudding.
Its fruit layer is candied peel, rather than jam,
but the proof's in the pudding.
It's good. Mm.
The flavours are there, aren't they?
It's just missing the name Bakewell.
So how did this sweet-meat pudding become associated with the town?
I think it's because the railways came here, and with it,
a lot of Victorian tourists.
And everyone went to the nearby spa towns of Matlock Bath and Buxton,
and people wanted a piece of the pie - or the pudding, so to speak -
so they kind of put Bakewell with the pudding to lure in the tourists,
because... Saying, "This is our regional speciality"?
Yes, because if you...
If you're on holiday, you want to eat the local specialities.
An invented local speciality to haul in the tourists? Yes, yes.
I would never have guessed.
The creation of the Bakewell pudding was a masterstroke of marketing,
so successful that the word "Bakewell" became a shorthand for
this winning combination of almond and fruit flavours in all its forms.
How does it become a Bakewell tart?
Well, in the recipes, there have been some differences towards
the 20th century, and one particular one -
here in Mrs Leyel's book - is very significant, because this is
the first time that the recipe of a Bakewell pudding
starts to look exactly like a Bakewell tart.
So it's getting more cakey?
It's getting more cakey. We are moving towards the more frangipane
version that we know today as a Bakewell tart.
Right.
So, hang on now...
..we're nearly there, but we're not quite there, are we?
Because you're saying a Bakewell tart, but you don't mean
the Cherry Bakewell? Not yet?
Not yet, exactly.
This gives us a really good insight into how food can evolve.
We first have the sweet-meat pudding...1727. Yeah.
And then it moves onto a Bakewell pudding. Yeah.
Then we have the Bakewell tart,
and now we have the Cherry Bakewell,
which is the last stage of our journey, really.
TV AD: I saw a lot of cherries in the bakery
the other day, and I asked what they were for.
MR KIPLING: "To put on top
"of my new Cherry Bakewells, of course," he said.
This is another piece of clever marketing.
It was invented in the 1970s.
They made it into an iced Bakewell tart, which you can keep for longer
and mass manufacture, so everyone - even outside of Derbyshire -
can enjoy a Bakewell tart.
Fabulous!
The town may not claim the cherry version as its own,
but whether the Bakewell in all its forms was dreamt up here or not,
they all have one thing in common...
..they're very tasty.
Back in Stoke, we're one hour, 19 minutes in,
and my massive 165kg batch
of shortcrust pastry
has been mixing for 90 seconds.
Now that is a beautiful pastry mix.
But this big ball of dough would clog up the delivery chute,
so it's sent through what they call the nibblers...
There she goes.
..where 672 rotating teeth chew it up into little bits.
It doesn't take long for it to eat that, does it?
No, not at all. In fact, it'll eat probably 1,000kg, actually, an hour.
A tonne an hour? A tonne an hour.
From the mixing bay, gravity drops our pastry to the floor below,
and the start of our Cherry Bakewell production line...
Fabulous.
..where I'm rejoining Mark.
This is when it starts to look like cakes, right?
That's absolutely right, yeah.
So the paste that you made upstairs earlier,
you placed onto the nibblers.
It's actually now in this chute.
At the bottom of the chute, the pastry is divided up,
21g at a time, ready to head into individual baking trays.
For the next part of the process, we use foils.
Are they the little foils that are actually in the box?
That's right, yes.
The uncooked pastry goes straight into the little foil
that we take out of the box? Correct.
And you cook them in that? Correct.
Now I never knew that.
So do you grease these? No.
Well, how does the pastry not stick to them?
One of the key ingredients is margarine.
Margarine heats up and it releases the oils,
so it stops the pastry from being baked in.
15 foils at a time are dropped down onto the conveyor belt,
the pastry drops in...
..then metal punches - called dies - press down, push up the sides
and imprint the crimps in the top.
Tell me, where that die pushes down on the pastry... Yeah.
..the pastry's sticky... Yeah.
..why doesn't it stick to the die when it comes back up again?
Predominantly, because the die's hot - it's heated.
And the margarine causes the separation of the die
from the pastry case.
Now our plain pastry cases get tarted up...
..with a slick of colour.
How much jam goes in each tart?
Five grams.
Now, I would've thought that would've been strawberry jam. Is it?
No, it's a plum and raspberry flavoured jam.
Can I taste that? Absolutely.
Sweet. Yeah. Little bit sharp.
I wouldn't have tasted plum. I'd have got raspberry.
No-one else is going in that pot, are they? No.
I can have another bit.
Why do you use plum and raspberry?
It's readily available, for consistency,
and it also helps to enhance the overall flavour.
How do you stop the jam trickling over the side of your tart?
You get an injection - a pulse of jam - with a very clear cut-off,
so there's almost like a blower.
So a little jet of air... Yeah.
..pushes out each spoonful? That's correct.
Squirt, air, squirt, air... Yeah.
..squirt, air, squirt.
MUSIC: Jamming by Bob Marley and The Wailers
It's like Bob Marley...
..Jamming.
# Well, all right
# We're jamming
# I wanna jam it with you
# We're jamming, jamming
# I hope you like jamming too... #
When the guys here get around to baking these pastry cases,
I can guarantee one thing...
..they'll come out of the oven with a perfectly crispy base.
But for home bakers, like me, it's not quite that simple.
So how do you avoid the dreaded soggy bottom?
Over to Cherry.
Whenever I buy a pie,
the base is crispy and delicious.
But when I make them at home,
its way more miss than hit.
In search of solutions,
I'm meeting food scientist Dr Stuart Farrimond.
Hi, Dr Stu. Cherry, great to see you. How are you doing?
I'm not that great, to be honest. OK.
Because I have a really bad case of soggy bottom.
With your pie? Yes, with my pie.
Yes, OK. Thank goodness.
According to Dr Stu, there are five scientific golden rules
to help you swerve the sogginess.
Rule number one...
..preheat the oven.
For our fan oven, we're going for 180 Celsius...
..but don't just wait for the light to go out.
Most people think that they're preheating their oven, but they're not really.
They turn it on, and then as soon as the light goes out,
they put their baking in.
But the light is there for a reason, the light tells me it's pie time.
It's not true. It means that the air temperature is at the temperature
that you set it at, but the oven itself - the walls - are still cold.
So leave it on at least 15 minutes,
so that the metal walls are up to temperature.
You need to get that pastry cooked quickly if you want it to be crispy.
Rule number two...
..maximise the heat below your pie dish.
Another tip for you,
for getting the temperature as high as possible,
is to use a pizza stone.
Why would you put a pizza stone in your oven if you're making a pie?
If we put in a pizza stone,
or if you haven't got a pizza stone, just use a heavy metal oven tray,
then you have heat coming from the bottom, which will help
the bottom cook very quickly.
Rule number three...
..choose the right dish.
OK, that's your pie dish?
Yes. It's not great for pies.
Why is it called a pie dish, then?
This is a ceramic-style pie dish.
It's got a long time to heat up, and will cook slowly,
some of the fats will melt and come out, and we'll get a soggy bottom.
If that isn't good...
..for a pie - what is?
We want to go for metal, so something like this.
You are blowing my mind today.
A metal pie dish. Why?
Because it will heat up quickly, and also, you want a black dish,
because if it's silver, it will reflect some of that heat away.
Another great pie dish is one that is made out of tempered glass,
like this one, and this is great because if you've got your
pizza stone or thick oven tray underneath, then the radiated heat
will pass straight through, and it will help bake the bottom
of the pastry, and you won't have a soggy bottom.
Which pie dish are we going to use today?
The black metal pie dish.
Rule number four...
..roll the pastry to the correct thickness.
How thick do I want my pastry?
Because, I have to say...
..I guess every time.
Ideally, you want something between three and five millimetres.
I don't want to sound like I'm not committed,
but I don't often have a ruler in the kitchen.
I have a great little hack for you. Two 20ps...
OK.
..on top of each other... OK.
..will give you an ideal depth for your pastry.
What a brilliant tip!
Has my pastry passed the test?
Your pastry has passed the two 20p test.
Yes!
After lining my dish with pastry,
this is when I'd usually bung my filling on top,
and stick it in the oven.
Which brings us to rule number five...
..blind baking.
So, what we're doing is part-cooking the pastry
before we put the filling in.
And the reason for that is that if we don't do it,
there's a danger that the pastry won't be cooked by the time that the filling is done.
We prick the pastry with a fork,
and cover it with greaseproof paper, weighed down with rice,
which stops air pockets forming and the pastry bubbling up.
Preheated oven. Great.
In we go. Lovely.
Towards the top.
Ten minutes near the top of the oven,
followed by three to four minutes without the paper and rice,
gives us a golden brown base.
Ah, look at it. Ah...
On the top, that's lovely.
Blind baking partly cooks the pastry, which stops the gooey pie filling seeping in.
Lift... Go, go, go, go, go!
Hey! Amazing.
Yay, look at that!
In she goes.
30 minutes later, the moment of truth.
It smells good, it looks good. It smells amazing!
But what we're really here to see is whether it has a soggy bottom.
Yep.
Wow! Look at that!
My first-ever pie that doesn't have a soggy bottom!
Mm-mm! Mm-mm!
That's a good pie. It is, isn't it?
Back in Stoke, on our industrial pie production line,
I've been sent to a high-security zone to collect the next ingredient.
Hey.
Khalid? Ey-up.
All right, good. Great.
I've come to get me almonds, right?
I'm meeting mixing bay operative Khalid Hussain.
Why are they in a cage here? Why are they locked away?
Well, we keep them separate cos it's a nut product.
We don't want it to cause contamination with anything else.
Because people have nut allergies, right? Yeah. I gotcha, I gotcha.
So we're getting the ingredients together for the frangipane.
Frangipane, of course, is an almond flavoured cream. Yeah.
It goes into lots of cakes.
It's one of my favourite flavours in the world, actually.
So, how much of that do we need?
Two kilograms.
Right. And it's important to be precise, right? Yeah.
We've got our beautiful almonds - where do we go now?
From here, they go to the sieve area to get sieved.
Our ground almonds are shaken through a 2.5mm mesh,
and passed over a strong magnet to make sure the batch is clear
of any fragments of shell or metal.
That's it.
Now what?
Now we take it to make the frangipane.
From the nut room,
I'm taking my ground almonds back to the mixing bay,
where Dave Alcock is as nutty as I am about this fragrant filling.
I've got the sieved almonds.
What's this? Have you started making the mix without me?
Yeah. What's in there?
Flour, water, fat, sugar, egg.
We're just waiting for yours now.
Just tip it in, yeah? Yeah.
You can't have frangipane without almonds, can you? No.
But there's still more to go in,
including an unexpected ingredient.
So, what's this? Coconut.
Coconut? Yeah.
Why coconut?
It's like the almonds, for the texture and the flavour.
Coconut also helps thicken up our mix.
Now there's just the flavour to go in.
Almond essence? Yeah.
I've got almond essence at home,
in a little glass jar like that.
That doesn't all go in there, does it? Yeah.
What, all of that? Yeah. All that.
655g will flavour all 148kg of mix.
Strong, isn't it? Yeah, but it's beautiful.
I could spoon that out now.
Or...maybe it's better that we get it mixed first?
A quick 60-second blast transforms it into a smooth paste.
Now the challenge is getting it from this big tub
to our little tarts.
Hang on a minute, hang on a minute, hang on a minute...
So what is that? Is that going to go through the floor?
Yeah, it's a delivery pipe down to the hoppers underneath on the line.
Just through a hole in the floor? Yeah.
How do you know it's in the right place? Look.
You literally have a look? It doesn't clamp in place? No.
So if we start pouring and we move that, we are going to have
an almighty mess? Yeah.
If you just want to slowly open the valve?
I'm a bit nervous.
That'll do. Ho-ho-ho!
Oh!
Dave, what's that?
It's the inspection hatch.
Oh!
It's quite incredible that this goes through a hole in the floor.
It's even more incredible that you can see it below. Yeah.
Our gloopy almond mix flows down a pipe and into a hopper
on the main production line.
One hour, 34 minutes in,
and I'm following my filling downstairs to catch up with Mark.
Mark. Hi, Gregg.
That's my frangipane. That's right.
That goes into there, and then it comes through these pipes.
How many of them? 15.
And squeezes just the right small amount into each tart?
Yeah.
How much frangipane into each of these tarts?
Nine grams.
And that batch that I made upstairs - how long will that last?
20 minutes.
Just 20 minutes? 20 minutes.
Now our Cherry Bakewells have their pastry case,
jam layer and frangipane filling...
..it's time to step things up a bit...
..on this strange-looking contraption.
Right, what's happening here? They seem to be lifted up - row by row.
It's a Franklin transfer system.
This whole set-up was designed by one of our project engineers
some 40 years ago.
His name was Franklin? Yeah.
This complex system of cogs and levers is doing a very simple job,
transferring our tarts from one conveyor belt to another.
It's so clever how it lifts them at the front,
but keeps on lifting them at the middle and the back,
and placing them gently down.
Are you absolutely sure this is necessary?
We haven't managed to find anything that will replicate this
in a consistent and an efficient fashion.
That's got to be the oven, right? That's right.
That's going in to baking? Yeah.
But you haven't got the cherry on it, or the icing?
Not at this stage, not pre-bake.
That's cos the icing and the cherry doesn't need cooking, right?
As they begin their journey through the 38-metre oven,
things are hotting up for our pastry cases.
Why is it so long?
To enable us to bake the products as quickly as we do,
and as thoroughly as we do.
Inside, our tarts head through a series of different heat zones.
They regulate from 195 degrees in the first burner,
going up to 210 for burners two and three,
and back down to 195.
This variable temperature baking ensures the pastry cooks evenly
and crisps up on the bottom.
How long does it take from one end of the oven to the other?
It's eight minutes, 24 seconds.
And in that time, there's 6,000 Cherry Bakewells
going through that oven as we're looking at it now.
Whenever I'm in a factory,
it always amazes me that we must be consuming them
as fast as you're making them!
The tarts in the oven wouldn't be the same without their almond filling...
..but where and when did it get that strange name - frangipane?
Ruth headed across the Channel to find out.
Ah, Paris...
..home to the Eiffel Tower,
the Arc de Triomphe...
..and, of course, sweet pastries.
If you step into any French patisserie, the first thing
that hits you - besides the beautiful array of cakes
and pastries - is the smell...
..a great waft of sugar and almonds.
Or frangipane.
To discover the origins of this aromatic filling,
I'm meeting French food historian David Downie...
David! Nice to see you.
..who has brought an unusual gift for me.
Ooh, a lovely new pair of red gloves!
But what on earth has that got to do with frangipane?
Now, these are perfumed gloves. Oh, really?
Yes. Sniff. Oh, yeah! They are perfumed, aren't they?
And what do they smell of? They smell of almonds.
Very strongly of almonds.
And they were the rage in the 17th century,
when this square was built.
At that time, Paris was a rather different place.
For one thing, the population density was about 20 times what it is today.
Wow!
Almost half a million people were crammed into a city without sewers.
So there was a certain tang to the air,
I believe you say "pong" in your country.
And the nobility, who could afford it, wore perfumes. Right.
They wore it on their clothes and, specifically, on their gloves.
Now, here's the recipe for making those gloves,
from the royal perfumer, a book.
And if we look at them, they are called frangipane gloves.
Oh, goodness!
So who on earth was this...Frangipane?
There is a Marshal of France named Pompeo Frangipani.
A favourite of Louis XIII,
Pompeo Frangipani was a perfumer whose name became synonymous
with the fashionable almond fragrance he perfected.
But how does that translate into food?
Legend has it that his maggiordomo - his butler - took the name of
his master, and applied it to this much older recipe
for the almond-filled tart. Ah...
So we've got the same name being applied to a particular tart.
And the pair of them, the gloves and the tart, have a similar smell.
Smells like frangipane.
A fashionable scent becomes a fashionable flavour.
To get a taste of 17th-century Paris for myself,
David's helping me cook up the very earliest written recipe
for frangipane.
Oh, I see you've got everything here!
Look. Marvellous! Ready to go.
So, this is our recipe?
Yes.
It's from La Varenne's Le Cuisinier Francois,
which dates back to 1651.
So, take some flour and cook it in your milk.
The ingredients of this 370-year-old recipe are similar
to those you'd use in a modern frangipane.
Now, you'll notice that this is very scientific
and it has all the measurements and the weights...
Yeah, none of them! Right.
None of them, that's the way I like cooking, no measurements. Exactly!
No spelling, no measurements.
I've put in about two tablespoons of sugar.
Would you put in more, or...?
1653, at the price of sugar - no, I wouldn't!
SHE LAUGHS
I'm leaving the beautifying to you. OK.
I can't be trusted with anything that has to look pretty!
25 minutes later, it's cooked.
Ooh, look at that!
Now, that does look good, doesn't it? Mm!
And it smells like gloves!
SHE LAUGHS
The fashion for perfumed gloves was a short-lived craze.
Mm, oh, that's nutty!
But thanks to this fragrant filling, Frangipane's name has lasted longer.
Cake is king! Absolutely.
Almost three hours in, our Cherry Bakewells
are looking suitably regal.
Eight and a half minutes in the oven has firmed up the frangipane
and crisped up the pastry.
They march out 15 at a time with their new all-over tans.
Do you feel good about that? Yeah, they look really good, yeah.
I could eat them without the icing, to be honest!
HE LAUGHS
Before we can allow them to continue their journey,
we need to check they're fully cooked.
So, with a hand-held temperature probe,
and what we're looking to achieve at this point
is a temperature of a minimum of 95 degrees.
The reason it's 95 degrees, is we're looking to ensure
that the Cherry Bakewells are food safe,
that the baking profile has been achieved.
The next part of the bake check is to ensure that there is
no soggy bottom.
Yeah, that's what I want to see. Come on, then.
That has not stuck to the tin, like I thought it would. No.
And that is a perfectly dry,
cooked all the way through, tart bottom. Yeah!
Come on, I'll nibble this if you're not looking!
HE CHUCKLES
Test passed, the tarts are allowed some time to chill out.
As they saunter along 22 and a half metres of conveyors,
their temperature gradually drops from 75 Celsius, down to 45.
This ensures the pastry hardens without cracking.
Come on, I know you see this every day.
Tell me you're not impressed by this - that's fantastic.
No, it's good.
The conveyor then passes through this big yellow fridge,
where our tarts enjoy a six minute blast of cool air.
When they emerge, they're at a comfortable handling temperature,
ready for another step class.
FUNKY MUSIC PLAYS
They drop six at a time into the trays
that they'll leave the factory in.
I can't believe that you actually bake the whole thing in its tin,
and I can't believe you put the icing on once it's in the plastic.
Don't tell me - you put the cherry on once you've got it
inside the box!
HE LAUGHS
We're not that good!
These tarts are still a little underdressed
for the outside world...
..so, I'm heading to the factory's icing room,
to sort out their topping.
Hello, Gregg. Are you John?
I am, it's me. How do I get up?
Round the corner.
I'm meeting icing technician, John Harding.
Hello, Gregg. All right, John. Morning!
Right, we're making icing, right? Fondant icing, yeah.
Where do we make that?
We're going to use this machine today.
Right, OK, the great big witches' cauldron. Does that open up?
Yes, I'll show you.
And I thought I had a big mixer at home!
This one's 1,000 litres!
Yeah, take the hose into there.
We're mixing up a batch of luxurious soft fondant icing.
And the first ingredient is 96 kilos of glucose syrup.
Will this automatically stop when it's had enough?
No, no, you turn it off, same as you turn it on.
How many Cherry Bakewells will this icing mix cover?
So, it'll probably last the plant around one hour 30,
and it will cover 64,000 cakes.
Why is this not done automatically?
Because if you take your eye off the ball, you're going to mess it up.
You don't take your eye off the ball!
94, 95, 96. That'll do, that'll do.
How long have you been icing Cherry Bakewells, John?
Er, 42 years.
42 years! 42 years.
Has the recipe changed in that time?
No.
The size of the mix, yes.
The mix itself, no.
What do you like about working here?
It's a challenge every day,
to make sure that they don't run out.
As quick as they make cakes...
They want it, we've got to make it.
You pride yourself in always giving them the icing.
Correct! You are the icing on the cake.
That's the one!
THEY LAUGH
Liquid ingredients in, we close the lid before we call for the dry ones.
So, what we need to do now, take this and tap on that pipe
above you, the metal part.
So that it will drop down the sugar, into the bowl.
He's waiting for me to tap it? Yes.
All this million pounds' worth of industry,
and I've got to get the sugar by tapping on a pipe?
That's the most important tool of all.
What's your normal tap?
Just two taps.
That's the one.
Here's your sugar now.
432 kilos.
That's probably about five cups of tea for me!
There we go, he's knocked on there to tell you that it's all in.
I only did two knocks, he's playing a tune.
OK, start the machine.
It simmers in this heated mixer for 20 minutes,
reducing down and thickening up.
Once it's cooled, we add another ingredient.
This is egg white, sugar - mixed up into a marshmallow product.
It's like a meringue mix. Yes.
This will help our icing set and make it shiny.
Wahey!
Our next ingredient is also upstairs.
That'll do.
This will be condensed milk.
Condensed milk? Condensed milk.
What, like you get in a tin? Exactly.
That will give your texture, taste.
When you're eating it, it tastes quite creamy, yeah?
So that's why we add that. Creamy and rich!
Yes.
Another good mix for 30 minutes and it's ready.
We're going to tip it out and if you can stand here,
I'll give you that.
Do I need to be scared of this, John?
There's quite a lot of topping coming out.
MUSIC: Ride Of The Valkyries by Wagner
Whoa!
Look at that!
HE LAUGHS EXCITEDLY
Now, work the scraper.
Now, all you're doing is scraping the lip off.
What, here? All the way on the edge.
On the edge.
This is a good job.
I like this. This is a great job!
I love icing and iced cakes - and I'm not the only one.
Last year, we spent over £2 billion on birthday and wedding cakes.
Cherry is steadying her hand at one of the country's biggest producers.
Oldham, Greater Manchester, is home to Park Cakes,
where 60 specialist decorators top over eight million cakes a year
for Marks & Spencer.
Hi, Riz, lovely to meet you. Hi, lovely to meet you.
Production manager Riz Ali is challenging me to have a go
at some of her bestsellers.
First up, it's the tulip cake.
Andrea Grady makes it look easy, and I can't wait to get started!
What is the secret to a perfect tulip?
There's three things - the texture of the buttercream. Mm-hm.
The nozzle. The nozzle? Yeah.
So, that gives you a lovely tulip... Yeah.
..shape, OK, what else?
And the holding of the bag.
That hand there, that hand there. OK, great start!
And then, do that. OK, here we go.
In the middle. In the middle.
Lift.
That's the saddest tulip I've ever seen!
Instead of pushing down, just bring it up.
Oh, OK.
Oh, look! There you go. That's a good one!
You've just got to do it lightly. Hello, there!
Shame about the other ones, never mind!
Oh, look at that! There you go.
If you close your eyes a little bit, then it looks amazing.
But what does Riz think?
Would that get past quality control? It wouldn't.
Do you think I'd be sent home to have a day off? I think so, yes.
Sort myself out? Yes!
My next challenge is another flower,
a blush rose for one of their wedding cakes.
Shamima Akhtar is showing me how to make one.
I can see you've layered them, and then you've twisted them round.
Yeah.
A special ingredient called tragacanth gum makes this icing
pliable enough to shape into delicate petals.
So, it's really just a millimetre thick. Yeah.
That's incredibly thin!
But it quickly starts to go hard, so I've got to work fast.
Well, it does look like a rose, at least.
It does look like a flower.
Now we airbrush on the blush effect, using a dye made of beetroot.
So, now these are ready, where do we take them? To the wedding room.
Take them into the wedding room? Take them into the wedding room.
Do you play Abba in there? No!
# I do, I do, I do, I do, I do...#
Christine, I hear you're the woman to talk to about
assembling a wedding cake. Yes.
I've brought one for you specially.
Look, that can be your first rose, to go on the cake.
No!
I don't think Riz would accept that!
So, here's a much nicer one.
How on earth do you get this rock-solid rose,
that's quite heavy, to stick precariously
onto the side of a cake?
Just this icing. OK, just the icing? Yeah.
What's that icing? Royal icing. Royal icing.
Why do you use royal icing?
Because it sets hard. So, it's like cement. Yeah.
Edible cement. Edible cement!
A mix of icing sugar, egg whites and lemon juice -
royal icing got its name after it was used to decorate
Queen Victoria's wedding cake in 1840.
Ta-da, it's finished!
That's really good. Isn't that amazing? What do you think?
You've done a good job, yeah.
But now for my ultimate challenge!
So, this is our Chocolate Caramel Dribble Cake.
We don't have long to decorate this. Why? So, the key is...
Because the chocolate sets and then the chocolate components
don't stick to the cake, basically.
Are we revving things up a bit? So, we're revving it up now.
We've come to extreme icing.
Extreme speed!
Three fountains keep our molten chocolate at 40 degrees Celsius.
OK, ready?
Is that enough? Yeah, let's go.
OK. Is that enough? Yeah.
OK, now wiggle.
So, you're going to give it a little shake,
so the chocolate falls down the sides.
Why won't it go?!
A little bit faster, so you can...
It's all in the wiggle!
It's a race against time to get all my chocolaty baubles
on the top before it sets.
Of all of the cakes that I've iced today,
this is probably the least bad, but I did not dribble well.
No, and that's another one doesn't pass quality control, I'm afraid.
Are you saying I have to go home with this one?
I don't know about that! Oh, go on!
Go on, then.
Well, I think I can safely say that I'm better at eating cake
than decorating them, but I can live with that!
PIPES CLANG
We're three hours, 35 minutes into production of my cakes.
I'm hooking my 841 kilos of sweet fondant icing
up to a delivery tank, because Mark is waiting for it
on the main production line.
Hello again, mate. Hi, Gregg. You all right?
Hey, my beautiful icing!
The way that's going on there, and not dripping over the pastry,
must be the same principle as the jam?
Yes, it's exactly the same. Eh, I'm learning!
So, there's a little bit of air in between each squirt.
That's right.
That stops anything dripping over the side.
These precision dollopers are dishing out 13g
of my precious icing onto each tart.
What happens if, say one batch of the frangipane hasn't risen
as much as it normally does, then your icing won't go
to the top of the tart?
No, that's right.
What we'd end up having to do is put more of the fondant icing in,
to achieve the correct fill level.
Just by turning it up a little bit, like a tap, is that right?
That's right, yeah.
That's all right, it's not an issue, is it?
The fondant icing is the most expensive bit
of the Cherry Bakewell.
Is it? It is.
No need to turn the tap up today, as we've got our proportions
spot on.
Stage one of their beautification complete,
the cheeky final touch is...
..the cherry on top!
French glace cherries are washed clean of their sticky syrup.
Kirsty, cherries, yeah? Yes, cherries.
Can I help? Of course you can!
Then they're given a once-over by cherry checker,
Kirsty Meakin.
What have I got to do?
We basically have to sort through them.
We have to take the bad ones out.
Tip it there.
They'll come on the... Hang on, hang on, that's too fast!
Can we slow the machine down? No.
I'm going to miss bits. I'm sure you won't.
I will. If you've got an eagle eye.
But someone's going to get a Bakewell tart with only a quarter
of a cherry and they're going to think I'm responsible!
I'm sure they won't.
What happens to the cherries we're discarding?
They go upstairs, they go in the flapjack.
Right, they don't get thrown away? No, no waste.
I don't suppose you know, do you, how many cherries
you go through here?
260 tonnes a year.
I wouldn't have imagined there were that many cherries in the world.
I know!
You'd be surprised.
Hey, I've got cherries!
Can I put them down? They're heavy!
A team of 12 places each individual half cherry by hand.
They're not wearing any gloves.
No, that's right, Gregg. Have you washed your hands?
Mate, I haven't stopped washing my hands in here.
All our staff regularly wash their hands.
Now I want to get stuck in, and Sue Lawton is showing me how.
Get a handful of cherries, go all the way along,
but make sure you're putting them in the middle.
Here, surely you can get a machine to do this, right?
Um, no, we haven't found a machine yet that'd be able to put
the cherries on the right way round, with them being half cherries.
Oh, I see.
You've got a massively quick technique,
you're kind of like a double hander.
I don't do it like the others do it, I prefer doing it my way.
How long have you been on here, doing the cherries?
About 13 years now. 13!
Since you were 12.
I wish!
How long have you been here? 12 years.
12 years? Yeah.
Do you like it? I love it!
Why? It's good fun, nice people, easy job.
Is there a song you sing to go with it?
# It's cherry pink
# And apple blossom white
# When your true lover comes your way
# It's cherry pink and apple blossom white
# The poet says...
There's certainly something to sing about -
all my Bakewells baked well!
# The story goes that once a cherry tree... #
These tarts were a nostalgic favourite,
but the basis of their filling is flavour of the month.
Almonds are big business, with sales shooting up
over the last year.
Cherry couldn't resist checking out how you turn nuts into butter.
I'm visiting Petrow Foods, near Cambridge,
where they make 350 tonnes of almond butter for Pip and Nut each year.
Pippa Murray is guiding me through the process.
Hi, Pip. Hey, Cherry.
Lovely to meet you. So nice to meet you too.
Boy, oh, boy!
That is a big bag of nuts.
About 16 bags of almonds sitting right here.
Millions and millions of almonds. Yeah.
Where do these almonds come from?
These almonds are from California.
If you look at it when it's on the tree, it has a green outer shell,
which is soft, and then inside, you've got the almond,
which is a seed.
So, an almond isn't really a nut?
No, technically part of a fruit, and the inside of the almond is a seed,
even though we classify it as a nut, if you buy it.
80% of the world's almonds come from California,
where they are harvested by a machine which is very logically
called a tree shaker.
They are sun-dried...
..collected up...
..then graded and shipped out.
At the factory, today's delivery is getting a once-over.
So, what is this machine?
So, this is the optical sorter, which is a fancy word for saying
a laser machine.
This hi-tech machine scans each almond with lasers,
weeding out any damaged or discoloured nuts.
So, there's two lasers that detect any bad almonds,
and they use air to shoot them out, and they'll come down
and into this bucket, but all the good ones get passed down
onto this belt and they go into a very big bag.
A tonne of graded nuts heads to the roaster.
Right, are we ready to release the nuts? Yeah.
Into the wild!
With the simple pull of a tag...
Ah! Woohoo!
SHE LAUGHS
Whoa!
The almonds pour into the hopper below...
..then travel into the 15 metre long oven,
where they're roasted at a low temperature.
Why do you roast the almonds?
Why not just take them in their raw state
and create the butter from those?
The roasting process brings out all the flavours within the almond,
specifically it's a special reaction that happens,
called the Maillard reaction, which is where the sugars and the proteins
react with each other and it creates new flavour compounds,
which really enhances, like, the nuttiness in the almonds.
The roast takes two hours.
They took their time. Yeah. Was it worth it?
Oh, it's gorgeous! Yeah, exactly.
You can really see the difference.
It's very intense, it tastes all toasted.
Yeah. And nutty and sweeter. Yeah.
As well as intensifying the flavour, roasting dries out the nuts -
ready for milling.
So, this right here is our mill.
So, right inside there we have these two stones.
This one actually sits on top of it, like that?
Yeah, exactly, and what you can see is that it's got a really
thin gap between the two stones. Right.
And it's that tiny gap which the almonds are being pressed through,
and eventually get turned into kind of, like, liquid.
The mill pulverises the almonds into a smooth paste.
Oh, yeah, look at that!
What's so incredible is when you see it roasted,
roasted for two hours, it looks like the driest thing on Earth.
I know.
And then, here, it's liquid.
The natural oiliness of the nuts is crucial to this transformation.
When you look at an almond, you can't automatically see the oil.
Yeah. And then give them a little grind.
Yeah. And out it comes.
Yeah, and it's all good fat, so it's, like,
completely rich in monounsaturated fat.
Butter created, there's only one other ingredient for our huge batch,
0.4% of salt.
So, is that it? Yeah.
Just almonds and salt and nothing else?
Yeah, for almond butter, that's all we do.
Two ingredients and eight hours of processing
have transformed six tonnes of nuts into 30,000 jars
of gooey almond butter.
In Staffordshire, it's been three hours and 49 minutes
since our flour delivery.
Our completed Cherry Bakewells take one final journey
towards the packing area, on an elevated conveyor high up
in the factory's rafters.
Mark, that's quite a long walk.
Why do those Cherry Bakewells have to travel so far?
The layout of the factory and the distance that we've walked
actually enables us to assure that the topping is set.
That's why it travels so far, just to give the icing time to set?
It helps us with that, yeah.
After their 70 metre stroll, our tarts have arrived
at the packing department, where we're picking up the pace.
Each tray of six is wrapped in a film to help keep them fresh.
But are the robots getting carried away?
I'm getting worried my beautiful Bakewells
are going to take a bashing.
Those suckers seem to be coming down there
with a fair amount of force.
I'm surprised they actually don't dent the tarts.
What the suckers are doing is coming down and sucking on the tray.
Ah, they're hitting those bits?
That's correct. Gotcha!
Now, the tarts slide into their red boxes
and then into cardboard cases, ten at a time...
..before racing to the distribution area,
where I'm meeting factory manager, Steve Morton.
Are those my Cherry Bakewells? They are.
Right, is that truck going to be completely full of my tarts?
Full of Cherry Bakewells by the end of the day.
How many pallets on there?
There'll be 52 pallets when it's full.
How many cases, how many boxes?
That'll be 4,200 boxes.
I don't suppose you know how many individual Cherry Bakewells?
265,000 individual Cherry Bakewells.
265,000?!
Yes.
That's today's quota and more.
It's taken a touch under four hours to make our Cherry Bakewells.
Now, it's time to ship them out to our shops and supermarkets.
From this factory, they head as far afield as Spain,
and even Australia!
While back in the UK, northerners are the keenest consumers,
closely followed by southerners.
I've met some great people here.
I mean, this is a very big factory, full of hi-tech equipment,
but what surprised me is, they bake the pastry inside the tinfoil case
and they put the icing on when it's in the tray,
but they still put every single cherry on top by hand.
Next time...
That's obviously supposed to happen, right? Yes.
..I'm helping transform raw cotton...
Oh, you can feel the power of it!
..into waxed jackets.
And here's my moleskin pocket. Yep.
CHERRY SHRIEKS
Cherry soaks up the science of staying dry...
So, that is my waterproof jacket? Yeah.
That's breathable? That's it.
..and Ruth sniffs out the history of waterproofing.
Oh, smells like linseed oil!
SHE LAUGHS