Every morning at 3:00am, while most of us are still sleeping, Gill Abbs begins her day.
By 4:30, she’s manning the ovens at Fitzbillies, the iconic Cambridge bakery, where she’s spent the last 50 years perfecting her craft.
Gill joined Fitzbillies in 1971 when she was just 19 years old. She was hired by Mr Day, the second owner of the bakery, to make their famous Chelsea buns and made history as the first-ever woman to work there.
During her first Christmas at the bakery, Gill was given the task of making one of its most beloved items, mince pies.
‘I was quite nervous to begin with,’ she tells Metro. ‘But you just had to do it. There was no “I can’t do that”, you just had to do what they asked.’
Thankfully, her first batch was a success. She recalls the men in the shop eagerly awaiting the results, including Reg, an experienced baker who wasn’t one to hand out praises.
Gill recalls: ‘I saw them standing there and even Reg, who was really skilled, he just said “these are really lovely”.
‘I was just really happy and proud,’ she adds.
As head baker, Gill has become synonymous with Fitzbillies. She’s worked there every year since 1971 – apart from a brief hiatus when a fire temporarily shut down the bakery.
During the Christmas season, Gill, alongside the team members at Fitzbillies, produces thousands upon thousands of mince pies.
Orders for the treat are placed as early as October, and over the eight-week festive period, Gill can oversee as many as 29,000 pies being made.
There are 48 mince pies to a tray. A small batch is 12 trays of 48, which is 576 pies. A big batch is 48 trays of 48, which is 2,304 mince pies.
When Gill first began making them, each one was crafted by hand. Now, they’re made with the help of a pastry machine and a team of bakers working on stainless steel tables.
She explains: ‘We’ve got around 10 people making them daily — two rolling the pastry, one rolling the tops, and another rolling the bottoms.
‘The other people fill the mince pies. They pipe the filling in, put the top lids on and sprinkle them in sugar and they go in the oven. It’s a really fun time of year.’
Over the past 53 years, she’s seen the bakery evolve, with everything from ownership to equipment changing.
It wasn’t until five years after Gill began that Fitzbillies hired another woman. ‘We had a girl come in to learn how to do cake decorating,’ she explains. ‘It was a lot harder, more heavier work than it is today.’
Gill says the most challenging aspect of the job is the ‘hard work’, as the role is ‘physically tough’.
‘There’s so much to make and some days you just think, am I ever going to get it done? Is it ever going to end?’
However, this has got easier over time, she claims, with modern conveniences such as lighter baking trays and lighter packaging.
‘What’s helped the most is the way we bake stuff, all the baked goods fit on smaller trays and they’re lighter,’ she explains.
Aside from the mince pies, the Chelsea buns are the bakery’s most popular treat, and they can expect to sell 300,000 in a year. Just yesterday they baked 45 trays, and with 40 buns per tray, that adds up to 1,800 buns in a single day.
The buns are filled with cinnamon, sugar, and currents and have syrup on them. They’ve followed the same recipe since they began. In recent years the bakery has experimented with flavours and has sold cheesecake, Nutella and blueberry buns.
The trickiest thing to bake for Gill is Macarons, which she described as ‘temperamental’.
Gill’s favourite part of working in the bakery? ‘It’s always the smell of the baked things. Especially in the morning, the bread and the Chelsea’s coming out of the oven.’
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