Memory Lane Cakes Creating Creamy Success with Boone Mixers
Market-leading Memory Lane Cakes in Cardiff, part of the Finsbury Food Group, have replaced old mixing equipment and expanded production capacity with new rotating discharge Horizontal Helical Blade Mixers( HHBM) from John R Boone of Congleton, UK. The HHBM mixers are being used to produce a wide range of cake batters, buttercream fillings and toppings that find their way into branded and own label cakes sold in the majority of the UK’ s major retailers.
It isn’ t easy, keeping pace with the changing tastes of the British sweettoothed consumer, and the leading supermarkets have a lively programme of product development to continue to excite the shopper with new styles and flavours of cakes. So much so, that Memory Lane have more than a hundred different recipes for buttercream fillings and toppings, and that’ s before you even get to the batters that are mixed for the cakes themselves.
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In production terms, the‘ creams’ present more challenges than the batters. In a domestic kitchen butter would typically be warmed before mixing, but under factory conditions a mixer has to cope with butter in 5kg blocks being added at 8-10 º C. Memory Lane also produce‘ ganache’, a mixture of around 60 % chocolate with 30- 40 % cream, which also present the same issues of quickly‘ conditioning’ the mixture to a homogenous, smooth paste.
Memory Lane is a very well established company, and many of the mixers on site were more than 30 years old. Paul Riley, Head of Engineering at Memory Lane, wanted to bring the mixing process up to date and looked for a company who could supply mixers cost-effectively and who had a good track record in supplying equipment for this application. Following discussions, John R Boone recommended a Horizontal Helical Blade Mixer( HHBM). Paul Riley said:“ We contacted John R