Spider on a Bicycle

Situated in the village, Aboyne, Spider on a Bicycle is a small local cafe with a focus on good quality ingredients, ethically sourced. Founded and run by sisters, Hollie and Emma who make everything from scratch on site.

What’s your favourite thing on the menu?

Our house-made sausage rolls are one our faves, made from scratch by us, we buy the meat from our local butcher across the Square from the cafe. Cake wise, it would have to be a tie between our cinnamon buns or the apple cake!

What do you love most about living in Kincardineshire?

We love the freedom of the great outdoors. We both live in Glen Tanar, just inside the Cairngorms National Park. Emma is a mountain biker and fitness coach in her ‘spare’ time and loves getting out on the trails, keeping fit and going on mini-adventures in her van. I [Hollie] am really into gardening, particularly growing my own food, and have a productive vegetable garden and poly-tunnel that I work on in my time off. We are really privileged to live in such a beautiful place with open wild spaces on our doorstep, so many opportunities to explore!

Who does the baking and cooking?

We both do. Emma is star baker though! We learnt how to cook properly through our mum and gained experience working in independent cafes here and abroad. I much prefer sticking to the savoury stuff - there’s nothing more satisfying than turning leftover vegetables into an amazing soup or stew for the cafe. We make as much as we can in house, and an ideal world we would like a bigger kitchen space to expand our menu, but we work with what we have!

How did you come up with the name Spider on a Bicycle?

We were in the process of setting the café up and working through our business plan and we desperately needed a name. We were adamant that it wouldn’t be directly linked to food or coffee, as for us it was also about creating a space and feeling. We were chatting it through over G&Ts one night and were inspired by a favourite children’s poem of ours, ‘A Spider Bought a Bicycle’. We had misremembered the title and there you have it! It was a stroke of good fortune that the premises we later secured was on a busy local cycle route, and we have loads of cyclists and mountain bikers as regulars now. It’s fun, and we think it’s important not to take yourselves too seriously sometimes!