Muffins bakery on the High Street in Midsomer Norton is a well-loved destination, so many customers were sad when due to the coronavirus pandemic it was forced to close.

But like a true trooper the new owner Frederika Wilcox made the best of a bad situation - using the time she was closed to renovate the shop.

She has only just taken over the business, and jokes that she has now dealt with four storms and one pandemic - in just a few weeks.

Frederika turned around the business when it was clear that during the early uncertainty over lock down, staff were concerned about safety.

So she closed up - at great personal cost - to ensure that only once they felt safe would she re -open.

That she now has done, and in the down time she also painted the shop interior and fitted in a new floor.

Frederika, who only took on the business on February 3, but who worked there for 17 years, knows the business inside out, but even she reveals she was blindsided by the pandemic.

Being open six days a week, with the baking staff starting at 1 am, none of them are worried about working hard, but the uncertainty about how to carry on working was something else.

Frederika gives a whole new meaning to resilient. She told Nub News: " I know it is pretty grim, but it is what it is. For the three weeks we were closed we made the best of it, painted all the walls and the woods and put in a new floor.

" We turned a negative into a positive. There is no way we could have replaced the floor in here (if we had been open ) because it took four days to do and we are open six days week."

Muffins make everything they sell on site and employ a total of 15 staff, but some are still on furlough.

They reopened for shortened hours (closing at 2pm) on April 20 and business has been slow, but Frederika and her team keep going.

She said: " It is picking up this week, I am getting word out that we are open. People are still coming in for their takeaway drinks. Our afternoon trade would be people leaving school so we don't have that so we are closing earlier. We open at 7.30 am every day.. but that's what we do ....we keep going."

Not only that but from Thursday(April 30) they will be selling small bags of flour, from plain and self raising, to strong bread flour and granary. The shop never ran short of supplies but needed to work out a way of selling smaller, consumer-sized packs of this much in demand commodity. So Frederika managed to get some small bags to sell it in and has set up a new line of sales.