James Middleton's cake venture dream crumbles

THE Great British Bake Off inspired many of us to try our hands at cake making, but the Duchess of Cambridge’s brother has admitted defeat in his attempts to make a fortune from the national obsession.

I can disclose that Companies house has issued a strike- off notice against James Middleton’s cake-making business, Nice Group London. The company, which Middleton set up in 2011, is due to be closed down in two months’ time and its name removed from the official register. An unnamed member of his family had secured a bank overdraft for Nice Group, which was £48,894 in the red, according to its last published accounts in 2015. Nice Group was the parent company for several firms started by James, who dropped out of edinburgh University after one year. he had started his first business, Cake Kit

Company, with an £11,000 loan from his ‘black sheep’ uncle Gary Goldsmith, a multi-millionaire former property developer.

It provided upmarket cake kits for people too busy to bake from scratch and sold them through Party Pieces, the mail-order website owned by his parents, Michael and Carole.

However, Cake Kit Company was dissolved in May 2015, alongside two other businesses James set up, Nice Cakes and Nice Wine. Nice Group London has lost money in each year it has traded. Its losses doubled between 2014 and 2015.

James, 29, who is courting 37-year- old blonde TV presenter Donna Air, is understood to live in a flat in Chelsea, bought by his parents for £780,000 in 2002.

He is trying to get a personalised marshmallow company, Boomf, off the ground. Based in a grain store near his parents’ Berkshire manor house, it suffered losses of £930,000 in 2015. Things became so tight that Boomf took out a £500,000 loan from Barclays in May 2016.

One backer of Boomf is his sister Pippa’s hedge fund manager fiance James Matthews, who recently paid over £100,000 to buy a stake of more than 12,800 shares.