GROWING up she loved nothing better than raiding her mother’s cupboards for ingredients and producing her own version of cakes and biscuits, which would then be disposed of before being eaten.

It was the start of a lifelong love of baking which has seen her rise to the very top of the confectionery world after being appointed as the manager of her own biscuit factory.

Morven Burden, 27, from Drumoig in Fife has been handed the keys to a massive plant in Romania that churns out millions of biscuits a year.

It is a far cry from her first homemade attempts as a child, but is the icing on the cake for the Scot who fared better in the kitchen of a five-star hotel in St Andrews where she was a pastry chef during her summer holidays from university.

Ms Burden is in charge of 250 employees and admits that despite graduating with a degree in economics, a career which involved baking was always her preferred option.

Now she produces three million biscuits a year, which is rather more than the desserts she produced for weddings at the luxurious Fairmont Hotel.

She said: “I used to make what I call pretend biscuits and cakes, which basically saw me go through my mum’s cupboards and grab any ingredients before tossing them altogether and seeing what happened.

“Although they weren’t edible it started something and I’ve always wanted to work in baking ever since.

“When I was at university, I wrote to all the hotels asking for a summer job in the kitchen. I would have quite happily just washed dishes, but the chef at the Fairmont said they wanted a pastry chef and that was the start.

“I was once crowned the Brandy Snap biscuit queen and held a record of making 2,000 by hand in a single shift.

“I loved it, especially weddings and other big events, and it was a natural step to make when I graduated to go into biscuit production.”

After leaving university, Ms Burden started at a McVitie’s factory in Carlisle where popular brands such as custard creams and bourbons are produced in their millions, before she joined the massive plant in Harlseden in London where they produce the famous digestives. Like many others would do if they were in her position she admits that she “samples” her favourite biscuits off the production lines.

But after eating so many of one biscuit, she becomes sick of them and moves on to another brand.

She becomes sick of that one too and them moves along the lines doing the same before a craving for the first one starts again and the sequence begins again.

She said: “It is very tempting and we do eat the biscuits until we get sick of them but we soon find our appetites again. Everyone’s the same and we’ve all been guilty of eating a whole packet of biscuits in one go.

“The sheer scale of how we in the UK love biscuits became clear when I started in London and we were producing something like 100,000 digestives a second, mainly for the British market.

“I often asked that surely we couldn’t eat that many biscuits, but apparently we can. Every country likes eating biscuits, but they just have different tastes”.

Just before Christmas last year, she received a phone call from the head of pladis, the firm that owns McVities, asking her to take over a plant in the Romanian capital of Bucharest.

She is the youngest factory manager at the multi-national at the age of just 27.

But she does not regret the move and is enjoying life in Romania.

She added: “The people have been very friendly and have taken to my management style very well as it is very different to what they are used to.

“Maybe it’s a throwback to the Communist era, but management in Romania is traditionally very regimented and the workers like the fact that I involve them in decision making.

“It is a smaller site than I’m used to but we still produce around three million biscuits a year and we have plans to grow the business four-fold.

“It’s very different to where I intended to be at this age as I thought that I would automatically go to the McVities factory in Glasgow seeing as I’m a Scot. But I’m glad I’m getting to travel.”

To someone who oversees the production of millions of biscuits a year the last thing you would expect her to do when she gets home is eat a biscuit let alone have a favourite.

But she does and unsurprisingly perhaps, her favourite is not one of the better known ones in the market.

She said: “I like all sorts, most of the kinds that everyone else likes, but I love chocolate gems which are small and filled with chocolate.

“They are my absolute favourite. They might not be that well known, but they should be.” Mandy Major, the factory manager at pladis’ Aintree site in Liverpool, has acted as a mentor to Ms Burden through her career at the firm.

She said: “Since joining us as a young graduate, Morven has shown true passion for the business and our sector. She has begun a remarkable career leading complex and varied manufacturing projects across pladis’ sites, and we’re immensely proud that she is taking on this new role in our global family, bringing all her expertise to Romania.”