A new patisserie with a special family history has opened in Cleator Moor.
Aunt Polly’s Bakes, on High Street, officially opened last Thursday, in the former H.Routledge clothing shop, after five months of renovations.
Run by Phoenix Pears, 21, of the town, the patisserie is a new side of family run wedding and celebration business Aunt Polly’s Bespoke Cakes and Decor which Phoenix helps run alongside her her mum Tanya Pears and events stylist Chrissy Eaton.
Serving up cakes, cookies, waffles, ice cream sundaes and savoury foods like pies alongside a lunch and breakfast menu – the new shop has already received a huge wave of support from the local community.
But Phoenix said there’s been one big question on everyone’s minds – who is Aunt Polly?
She said: “Lots of people keep coming into the shop and going, ‘who’s Polly?’ and the name is actually a family name!
“Aunt Polly was my grandma’s great aunt, so we are going back to the 1800s and Aunt Polly had a secret biscuit recipe.
“These biscuits were called Aunty Polly biscuits, she devised the recipe, and in those days it wasn’t weighing scales, it was done with this one cup and whether it was the sugar or butter, it was all done in the cup.
“So when Aunt Polly died she actually passed it to my great grandma Amy, so she got the cup and the recipe, because you can’t make the biscuits without the cup.
“So when my great grandma died, the secret recipe then went to the youngest girl, my grandma Ruth, who is now 83 and she has continued to make these biscuits, certainly throughout all my mums life.
“My grandma is a farmer, we’re from a farming family, and when all the contractors came to work, they would be fed these biscuits.
“Earlier this year, my grandma gave my mum the cup and recipe, so we’ve now actually worked out the recipe for modern times in grams, away from the cup!
“It’s a real intergenerational recipe and that’s where our name came from!”
Phoenix said that for those curious, the well-loved Aunty Polly biscuits will be sold in the shop for people try themselves from January onwards.
She added: “We will be selling the original biscuits and it’s quite a dunky biscuit that’s good for tea, but we’ve also come up with a doughy gooey variation as well.
“It’s all oats and chocolate and in those days they were used to feed the farmers in the field.
“I look back at the people who would come and work for my grandma on the farm and they would all be coming in saying where are the Aunty Polly biscuits!
“One of the lads who’d been working on the farm had gone off to Tesco and Morrisons and had come back and said to my mum and said oh I’ve looked everywhere for these Aunty Polly biscuits and I can’t find them!”
Both the patisserie and events styling side of the family-business have been set up by the trio over the last few months, but Phoenix said the family has been in the celebration cake business for much longer.
She added: “My gran has been a phenomenal cook and taught my mum and I remember watching my mum doing these big, extravagant celebration cakes, the bigger the better like nine tiers and seven foot high.
“That was alongside going to agricultural shows and doing home baking stuff, it’s certainly not all been big showstopper cakes!
“I suppose it started as more of a cottage industry to begin with, so these big wedding cakes and celebration cakes my mum’s been making for 20 years.
“The big change came in Covid, so I had always enjoyed pottering with my mum and gran and doing some baking, but I was working up at Mayfield School and I thoroughly enjoyed that, but I realised this was what I wanted to do. But I really wanted my mum and family with me to do it.
“So for me I’ve lived with it and around it and that’s where my passion has come from, and I thought you know what I need to do something about this, and there were a few conversations with my mum and dad around let’s do this, and here we are.
“But we started the event styling four months ago and we really started the patisserie running as a cottage industry for a year testing it out before we bought the shop.
“We brought in Chrissy who’s from the North East and she has a huge event styling background and the idea is that we can go into events and do the lot, so the buffet, wedding cake and tie in the decor to match everything.
“But people have said why Cleator Moor, and I’ve said well, I was born here, my mum and family are from Loweswater on farming country, so why wouldn’t I come to home to do it?”
Phoenix added that they are also planning to open the second half of the shop in the new year with a bigger seating area for customers.
She said: “We’ve opened a waffle station and we’re doing nice big sundaes and things like that because I realise growing up, where do young people have to go here?
“So we have some seating for now and in the new year, we are going to open up a seating area.
“The whole lot has had to be renovated from top to bottom down to then electrics, so it is a complete renovation. We bought it in August and it took us longer than anticipated to get open, but it has had a total change of use.
“The other part of the shop was going to be more about the decor, weddings and celebrations side of the business, but the drive has made us think okay, people are asking for somewhere to come in, sit and meet and have something to eat.
“But we do want people to come in, stay and chat with us. We don’t want them to be in and out, it’s not about that.”
As well as offering a large range of sweet treats, the shop will also offer a wide selection of savoury items and a pre-order savoury food service.
Bestsellers at the shop include meat and potato pies, giant s’mores style gooey cookies and lemon meringue and banoffee pies.
Phoenix said: “We do a full range of savoury, so we do full family size meals like lasagne, hotpot, cottage pies, soups and we’re offering lunchtime menus but we also do a pre-order service that we’re going to call ‘what’s for tea mam?’ so we make big pots and people feed their families with it.
“People can pre-order on the webpage and just tick what they want and we also have full slabs of savoury and sweet to buy.
“We’re also very conscious of our prices, we understand the area we live in and we want to be part of it, we are part of it because we live here, but we do want to see Cleator Moor rise.”
In the future, Phoenix said they are hoping to create employment opportunities and offer baking classes or workshops for the local community.
