Chris Rundle visits Dorset's family bakers S.Moores, whose Easter biscuits are a rare and delicious treat

I f you or I were running a bakery business, we'd almost certainly be going flat out at it, producing as much as we could day in, day out, week in, week out, all year round.

But it's nice to think that in one West Country bakery there's still room for seasonality to be taken into account.

And as far as the Dorset-based family company S.Moores is concerned, there probably always will be.

The mere mention of the name is probably going to start lights flashing and bells ringing in the minds of hundreds of people who rate their Easter biscuits as a rare and delicious treat.

They do, indeed, fly off the shelves at a remarkable rate.

But for all that success, they seem destined to remain a foodstuff which appears only in its proper season, unlike that other Easter speciality the hot cross bun.

In my grandmother's time, it would have been unthinkable to find a hot cross bun on sale anywhere before Good Friday. Now, such is the public's appetite for them that they are sold and eaten virtually year round.

You can look at this in two ways. You can either rejoice that one of the most delicious concoctions ever to emerge from a British bakery has found wider popularity.

Or you can bemoan the fact that this is yet another example of the notion of seasonality vanishing from our national diet.

The hot cross bun has followed asparagus, strawberries, spring greens and swedes down the road to all-year-round availability – though, unlike imported winter asparagus and strawberries and high summer swedes, the flavour of a hot cross bun will remain consistent through all 12 months.

But the Easter biscuit looks unlikely to follow that route. It's as genuine a West Country product as Bath chaps and hogs pudding.

Perhaps in view of the region's long association with the spice trade (which has also bequeathed us Cornwall's saffron cake), it also boasts a particular spice as an essential ingredient: oil of cassia, a milder and less overpowering relative of cinnamon. Old recipes show Easter biscuits to be similar to Shrewsbury biscuits: a rich shortbread mix flavoured with currants, spice and citrus peel – though the speciality varieties called for tiny Vostizza currants. And there was even a type specific to Sedgemoor in Somerset where they would add brandy to the mixture as well.

But wherever they were made, the biscuits were originally one of those many spicy, sugary indulgences families would fall on ravenously at the end of the 40 days of Lenten fasting.

It's quite difficult to imagine the rigours they would have had to endure, particularly centuries ago when diets were far from luxurious anyway. Even the last egg to be eaten would have been a distant memory, beaten into the pancakes on Shrove Tuesday as the store cupboard was cleared of sugar and anything else which might inject some forbidden richness into the food for the next five and a half weeks.

But Easter was the time when life in the kitchen and at the table returned to normal. Hot cross buns (marked with a cross to allow the devil to fly out) were but one example of the confections cooks would produce for the greatest event in the Christian calendar.

Not that we had a monopoly on them in this country. Scandinavia celebrates Easter with cakes and biscuits cut into special shapes and there is the famous Russian Easter bread, kulich – traditionally blessed at midnight mass on Easter Saturday.

Rich breads also emerge from the bakers' ovens in Germany and Switzerland, while some localities have their own specialities: Bremen, for instance, has an Osterklaben – a loaf similar to stollen.

In Greece, they eat lambropsomo, an almond-topped bread, the Castilian Spanish indulge in a savoury bread known as hornazo while in France they have agneau pascal, or Easter lamb biscuits, cut in the shape of a recumbent lamb with a meringue topping representing the wool. And down in Dorset, the Easter biscuit is still as seasonal a treat as its name suggests.

The Moores family has been baking in Dorset since before 1860, starting from a small bakery with a wood-fired oven and its own watermill in the Marshwood Vale, inland from Bridport.

The firm as it operates today was founded by Samuel and Eleanor Moores in 1880 in the village of Morcombelake, still home to a shop housed in what was the oven hall of the old bakery, with the actual baking now transferred to Bridport.

And if you haven't tasted a proper Easter biscuit, then this is the place to find one.

They've been using the same recipe for 100 years. But their production, says Joanne Cake, who's worked here for 17 years, is still strictly geared to the religious festival.

They may appear well ahead of Easter – the first ones are normally in the shop in January – but production ceases just afterwards when the bakery team turns its attention to other things.

Joanne said: "It's probably one of the very few products left that is only produced at a certain time of year, but they are still very, very popular. We seem to sell more each year.

"And I think people enjoy them all the more for the fact that they are only available for those few months."