Blog

Awards Archive

Thomas the Baker Heavenly Sweet Mince Pies Awarded 3 Star Great Taste Award

We are absolutely thrilled today to announce that our Heavenly Sweet Mince Pies have received the prestigious 3-star Great Taste Award – the first ever 3-star award given to a sweet mince pie in the 25 years the awards have been running! We launched this new luxury version of our customer favourite sweet mince pies, which have their own 1-star Great Taste Award from previous years, in 2019 after two years of careful development in our bakery. The filling of our Heavenly Sweet Mince Pies is a winning combination of sweet mince with apricots and brandy and a couple of secret ingredients. The all butter pastry shell has the addition of finely ground almonds for added taste and texture and the pie is finished off with a tender Viennese Biscuit topping. In the 8 week lead up to Christmas each year, we usually sell in excess of 200,000 mince pies – that’s 3000 extra man hours needed to meet high…

Read More

We’re On A Roll!

Thomas the Baker award winning deli black pudding sausage rolls

Have you heard the news? We’ve been awarded yet another Gold Star at the Great Taste Awards! This time, the award-winning product is our Deli Black Pudding Sausage Roll. Now we’ve always known that our deli sausage rolls are a stand out product thanks to their excellent quality locally reared pork sausage meat, a secret blend of herbs and spices, and a touch of rich black pudding, all made in Helmsley by Thomas’ master butchers and bakers. But the proof is really “in the pudding”. The judges at this year’s Great Taste Awards have proclaimed that our deli sausage rolls are “hearty” and “truly appealing looking” with a “crisp and buttery, flaky pastry with a moist well-seasoned sweet porky inside”. Our Deli Black Pudding Sausage Roll was originally only available in our Thomas of Helmsley deli, which is based in our hometown, Great British High Street’s award winning market town in 2015. Once we realised how much our customers loved…

Read More

In The Press

We’ve recently had a lot of press coverage, particularly of for our favourite Christmas products: mince pies and our new Triple Chocolate Stout Christmas Pudding! The top image here features my sister (on the left) and my grandad in the middle along with another lady, Claire, from the bakery showing off the recipe for the Christmas pudding. Then we have our feature from Living North and the Scarborough Voice. We’ve also been mentioned in the following places too for our mince pie success in Good Housekeeping: Daily Mail York Press British Baker The Helmsley Town Blog Gazette & Herald Do let us know if you mention us on your site – we’d be happy to add you to our list of press features. It’s always very exciting to us to find out that people like our products enough to talk about them in the press or on the internet!

Read More

Thomas the Baker Christmas Hamper

  I’ve mentioned before how busy the festive time of year is around Thomas the Baker, and we just like to make it a little bit more busy for ourselves! We’re currently putting together a luxury Christmas hamper that we just know you’ll love. This includes a good sampling of our yummy Christmas products including: 2 boxes of 6 award winning mince pies. If you remember from a recent post, these came out top in a taste test by Good Housekeeping magazine, even outshining the likes of Marks and Spencer, Bettys and Harrods. 1 Luxury Christmas Pudding. This has also won several awards, including the prestigious Gold Star at the Great Taste Awards. 1 small hand decorated fruit cake made to a deliciously moist recipe and topped with french glace cherries, walnuts and brazil nuts. Traditional waxed real Yorkshire Wensleydale cheese with a mild taste and crumbly texture. In Yorkshire, it’s a local tradition to serve your Christmas cake with a…

Read More

Thomas the Baker Mince Pies

  You might only just be starting to think about Christmas, but at Thomas the Baker we’ve been thinking about it for months! In fact, when I worked in the bakery a couple of years ago, I was surprised to see that they were starting to prepare for the Christmas rush at the end of summer! Now I always knew our mince pies were good, but it seems like lots of other people agree too – we’ve recently been named among the best mince pies in the country by Good Housekeeping, only just missing out on first place to Heston Blumenthal. Ours were awarded 73/100 and complimented on the delicious fruity filling, thin pastry and homemade appearance. We’re so pleased about this, particularly because ours came out above big names such as Bettys, Harrods, and Marks & Spencer. Not only do ours taste better, but they also come at a fraction of the price of other runner ups too –…

Read More