From Aberystwyth to Your Door: The Story Behind Our Handmade Welsh Traybakes

There is a small town on the west coast of Wales where the sea comes right up to the high street and the light in the late afternoon does something extraordinary to everything it touches. That is Aberystwyth. And that is where every single Ridiculously Rich traybake begins.

Not in a factory. Not in a central production facility somewhere near a motorway. In a real bakery, made by real people, using real ingredients — in the same place where this all started over a decade ago.

Where It Began

Alana Spencer started making brownies as a teenager. Not for a business, not for a plan — just because she loved them, and because the people around her loved them too. That instinct — make things that are genuinely delicious and share them — never went away.

In 2016, Alana won BBC The Apprentice. Lord Sugar backed Ridiculously Rich by Alana, and suddenly a small Welsh cake business had a national audience. What did not change was where the cakes came from, or how they were made. Aberystwyth stayed. The handmade process stayed. The obsession with quality stayed.

That is not the kind of origin story most food businesses can tell. Most scale by moving production, by standardising, by optimising for cost. We scaled by staying true to what made the cakes good in the first place.

What Handmade Actually Means

The word handmade gets used a lot. It is worth being specific about what it means here.

It means that when we make our Gooey Chocolate Brownie, someone melts real butter with 70% dark chocolate. Someone monitors the temperature. Someone checks the batter. Someone decides when it comes out of the oven — not a timer, not a machine readout, but a person who has made this hundreds of times and knows what right looks like.

It means that the Belgian Chocolate Rocky Road is pressed by hand into trays, that the marshmallows are distributed properly, that the chocolate coating is smooth and even because someone has taken care to make it so.

It means that when a new product like our Milk Chocolate Pistachio Kunafa Bar comes along — inspired by the viral Dubai chocolate moment — we test it repeatedly, in our Aberystwyth bakery, until the pistachio kunafa layer is crispy enough, the brownie base is gooey enough, and the milk chocolate coating is exactly the right thickness. We do not rush it. We get it right first.

Why Wales

People sometimes ask why we stay in Aberystwyth. The practical answer is that our team is here, our roots are here, and we have built something good in this place. The honest answer is that Wales has always produced people who make things well and do not make a fuss about it. There is something in that culture of craft — of doing things properly because it matters, not because someone is watching — that shapes how we bake.

The cakes travel to every corner of the UK. But they start in Wales, and they carry something of that with them.

What Is in the Box When It Arrives at Your Door

We ship in letterbox-friendly packaging that protects the cakes without refrigeration. Most of our products have a shelf life of seven to ten days at room temperature — long enough to post, long enough to savour, short enough that you know they have not been sitting in a warehouse for months.

The Mega Mix is the best way to try everything — fifteen different slices, one of each variety, so you can find your favourites. The Salted Caramel Slice tends to convert people who thought they were not really a traybake person. The Gooey Chocolate Brownie tends to stay with people for a long time after they have eaten it.

That is the goal, really. Not just to make something good. To make something that people remember.

Start with the Mega Mix and taste what we mean.