Julie’s creations are the icing on the cake

Since she produced a fantastically-detailed replication of her local pub, the Station at Birstwith - Julie has spent more time in the kitchen than Mary Berry.

She made the fruit cake for landlord Martin Green’s 60th birthday and she tells the Harrogate Advertiser it was a detailed project.

“It was a lot more complicated to make as it was hard to get everything in proportion,” she said. “All the chimneys face different ways.”

“My husband said ‘that gutter won’t drain.’

“I soon put him in his place,” she joked.

Her handicraft is so impressive, Martin cannot bring himself to cut the cake, even a year on.

Julie then turned her hand to transforming the Nidderdale pub’s regulars - including her dog Abbey - into fondant figurines for another cake, this time for barman Jonny McPartland’s 21st.

“The cake features a few of the locals. It’s the way they all stand at the bar and I took photos when they weren’t looking to see a lot of their characteristics,” she said.

Julie first attended a cake-making course about 20 years ago and only made about one cake a year until creating The Station - now it’s all taken off for her.

“I don’t think people in the village realised that I did cakes, I only made them for friends and family. Now I am inundated with requests.

“I’ve never done as many as I have done in the past year.”

Other cakes which appear here are a Mini cake, The Forager and a Happy Gardening cake.

It comes as no surprise that Julie, who works on a farm, is an avoid Great British Bake-Off fan.

“It’s brilliant the fact that they all make the same thing and they turn out so different,” she laughed.

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