Isle of SkyeBaking Company

Barry and Liza Hawthorne set up the Isle of Skye Baking Company in 2007, in an old mill on the Dunvegan road out of Portree, to make shortbread and oatcakes properly — Barry having trained as a pastry chef in Cape Town under a German master baker before Skye caught him. The oatcakes are the thing: crisp, honest, made for the island's cheese and its cold, and sold across Skye's markets and shops as well as further afield. It is a small husband-and-wife business, still owner-run nearly twenty years on, which is exactly why the baking has stayed as good as it started. Skye has become a hard place to run a food business — too many visitors, too little housing for staff — which makes a maker like this, quietly turning out oatcakes on the Dunvegan road, worth seeking out and stocking up from. Buy a few packets; they travel well, which is more than can be said for most of what you'll eat on the island.