We now have sourced most of the ingredients for the inner cake through donations from businesses in the Local Food Network and beyond. Baking starts this weekend!

Kathleen has made the most awesome mock up template for our cathedral structure!
We also have booked out the café from 1pm-5pm at Alington House, in Durham City Centre for Saturday 25^th June so people can come see us put it all together, get involved and find out more about what Transition Durham and Durham Local Food Network do!  Will post the details sooner the time!

Due to the local type of flour being quite strong, we have decided it would be best to make fruitcake as our main cake bit since this works best with the flour type, keeps for a long time and this will be a sturdy base for our building, we are then going to build the outside frame with gingerbread.

So far we have the following lovely ingredients donated from the following businesses…

Flour- all of it comes from Heatherslaw Corn Mill in Northumberland. We plan to go up and collect the rest of the flour in a couple of weekends and see the mill. I will post some lovely pictures up here when I can.
(http://www.ford-and-etal.co.uk/ford-and-etal/todo/listing.php?a_id=11)

Sugar- This is all Fair Trade and comes from the North East Co-operative in Durham through Richard Hodgson

Half of the Eggs, some Butter and the Nuts (Brazil Nuts, Walnuts, Almonds) come through Farm Fresh Direct Ltd. via Stephen Brown. They source their food through Durham County local producers and therefore help support local food producers/ businesses in the area and have a very handy delivery service!
 (http://www.farmfreshdirect.co.uk/)

Rest of the Eggs and Butter, Mixed Spices, Glace Cherries, Dried Fruit are from New Close Farm Shop in Sacriston, Durham via Jamie Bond. They provide fresh local produce food and have just recently re-homed some ex-battery hens which I’m glad to say were using the eggs from for our cakes. I’ll let you read more about it here…
( http://www.newclosefarmshop.co.uk/)


A local old fashioned sweet specialist Glen from- Sweet Greetings, Shildon, County Durham has donated us a lovely mixture of boiled sweets for our stained glass windows. They also have an amazing website shop which offers delivery, with all their types of traditional sweets for sale. I especially like the idea of locally engineered Tyne Mints, take a look below!
(http://www.sweetgreetingsshildon.co.uk/boiled-sweets/tyne-mints/pro...)

Finally, I’m very happy to say that Silverspoon have donated to us a selection of their sugar and cakecraft products such as icing sugar and ready made writing icing. The reason for contacting them was that they 100% farm and produce their sugar in Britain which means our icing sugar/ outside decorations  for the cake were sourced as locally as we could. It’s great to see ingredients that you would normally think are produced abroad coming from somewhere closer to home.
(http://www.silverspoon.co.uk/home/products/cakecraft)

Gingerbread Ingredients sourcing has been full steam ahead this week! (9/06/11)

I'm off to get the rest of the Flour tomorrow from Heatherslaw Corn Mill in Northumberland and picked up the rest of the organic local butter from the lovely New Close Farm Shop in Sacriston this evening.

Kathryn has been hard at work and managed to get a £20 donation from the Durham Co-op to get us Fair Trade Honey and Sugar for our Gingerbread outside.

Icing Sugar and Eggs for the icing of the gingerbread donated by A Slice of Perfection and Durham Greenlane