A FORMER school dinner lady has discovered a sure-fire recipe for success.

In just two years Allison Whitmarsh’s home-made cake business has gone from a table top enterprise to a company employing eight staff and baking 1,000s of cakes for sale around the region.

ProperMaid now supplies upmarket cafes, bistros, garden centres and art galleries as far afield as Manchester and Harrogate with speciality cakes.

The business is so successful that it has outgrown its present premises in an old carpet shop along the road from Allison’s home in Carr Street, Marsh.

She is now looking round for a bigger building to convert into a bakery.

Four years ago, mother-of-two Allison decided that life begins at 40. So she gave up her dinner lady job, having spent many years at Reinwood Junior and Infant Schools, and signed up for a hospitality management course at Huddersfield University.

She is a passionate baker and her original intention was to become a cookery teacher.

For one of the course modules students had to create a hypothetical business. So Allison invented ProperMaid, a cake-baking enterprise.

She said: “I did some research and as I went on I realised that I could have a genuine business here.

“People wanted a good quality traditional home-made cake with locally sourced ingredients. Nobody was producing one.

But Allison still had no idea how to set up a business. The turning point came when Huddersfield University steered her towards a three-day “boot camp” for entrepreneurs held near York.

Filled with enthusiasm and new-found knowledge, she returned home, baked some cakes and set up stall at her first Farmers’ Market in Huddersfield five days later.

Since then she has never looked back.

The university’s Business Mine, which helps budding entrepreneurs, gave her start-up cash of £1,800.