Butler native Gretchen Puff recalls enjoying many zucchini-based breads and cakes when she traveled to the Volant area with her family to peruse the goods and products for sale by the Amish.

That childhood memory figured into her creation of a cake that has won her an international baking award.

Puff and her partner, Steve Ridley, the owners of The Hedgeman’s Veg in Whitby, Yorkshire, England, were delighted to learn they earned the 2024 Great Taste Award from the prestigious Guild of Fine Food.

The couple won for their Amish Banana Zucchini Pecan Cake, which Puff created by heavily tweaking her zucchini bread recipe into a two-tier cake.

“I just sort of whipped it up,” Puff said from the farm she and Ridley share on the North Yorkshire Moors near the sea. “I get these ideas from everything I’ve done and been around, and I just thought ‘that flavor combination would be really great.’”

She deduced that the spiced pecans and bananas would add sweetness; the zucchini — called “courgette” in Great Britain — would provide moisture; and the zingy cream cheese icing dusted with cinnamon would perfectly offset those features.

As described by one judge on the panel, the cake is “glorious to look at, rich and uplifting, with a great balance of color and luxurious gold leaf. Added to the zesty fresh lime, and big, flavorsome nuts and fruit, there is much anticipation.

“On cutting, it looks moist and appetizing, with the icing being reserved, but glossy and nicely indulgent. The crumb texture is soft and quite bouncy, with a fruity aroma, led by the banana, and all in all … a perfect cake.”

Puff said the cake is extremely popular at The Hedgeman’s Veg, as no similar flavor combinations exist in Yorkshire.

“So many people are in love with it,” she said. “It definitely gets the most compliments.”

She said getting the finished cake from her farm in northern England to the judges in the south was an expensive undertaking, as it had to be carefully delivered by courier.

Puff said her father, retired Armco plant manager Jerry Puff, thankfully sent some financial support to pay the special cake courier.

When the day came to learn online who had won, Puff did not expect to be on the list of awardees.

“I expected them to say it needed this or it needed that,” she said. “(I’m) not a big chain or grocery store.”

But to her astonishment, the cake with rural Western Pennsylvania roots was given two of three stars among the 13,672 products to be placed under the judges’ noses.

“I was in tears,” Puff said. “Then I read the (judges’) comments, and it blew me away.”

The worldwide award earned her a certificate, and the Great Taste Award designation will appear with the cake from now on wherever it is sold, she said.

The cake recipe will not be widely available immediately.

“We decided we are not going to sell it to a chain grocery store,” Puff said. “We’re going to hold onto that recipe.”

She said she would consider sharing the instructions with a farmers market or local shop in Butler.

“Like Cummings,” Puff said with a nostalgic smile.

Puff, who grew up in the Meadowood plan in Butler and eventually graduated from North Allegheny High School, has been living in jolly old England for 24 years.

She prepares all her baked goods, quiche and other delicious dishes for The Hedgeman’s Veg from ingredients grown at her farm or those in an agricultural contractors group to which she belongs.

When Ridley could not farm a small area of the sunken area in a 4-acre field he bought when he retired and sold his hedgecutting tractor, Puff announced she would grow organic vegetables and fruit trees on the land.

“I said ‘Cakes and everything will come from this,’” Puff recalled. “He said ‘You’re mad!’”

Puff indeed includes the produce from her small garden patch in her creations, as well as pheasant taken on hunting trips enjoyed by her son, Chance, 14.

She uses eggs from her chickens and fresh fish and crab hauled in by commercial fishermen in her seaside town.

A goat farmer down the road provides cheese for recipes whipped up by Puff.

“And I just spoke to a chap who’s selling mushrooms,” Puff said.

All the food sold at Hedgeman’s Veg, which is a pop-up style stand that is in place along the main road at the end of her farm lane when it's not at a festival or other event, is made in the farm kitchen, Puff said.

The Hedgeman’s Veg is especially known for its sausage rolls, which she said measure 2 feet by 4 inches.

“It’s sausage wrapped in pastry,” Puff explained. “That’s a huge, huge seller.”

The Hedgeman’s Veg is currently up for awards for a beet recipe, the sausage rolls and a quiche.

“We do everything in small batches,” said Puff, who does all the cooking and baking with her baking partner, Sally Coward. “That’s what makes us artisan.”

She hopes to return to Butler for a visit at Christmastime, where she had many treasured memories of baking with her aunts as a child.

Puff still receives letters containing recipes and baking trends from an aunt in the area.

“I’m getting help from everywhere back home,” she said.