Abergavenny is to food what Cannes is to film, an annual festival for spotting rising stars in Britain's artisan-food firmament. Last autumn, amid an exciting and heartening array of things to eat and drink, one producer stood out: Catherine Moran, a neat Irishwoman, selling little desserts - some fruity, some chocolatey - in small glass ramekins.

I couldn't resist dipping a spoon into her Shropshire damson crème brûlée. I'm a sucker for this most elusive autumn fruit, and this dessert - made using plump, ripe specimens from her own garden just outside Britain's other foodie epicentre, Ludlow - offered its tart, punchy attitude enveloped in a soothing caress of creamy egg custard, made to her mother's old recipe.

Now hooked, I had to try her lemon posset, an Elizabethan recipe this time, containing only three ingredients: cream, lemon and sugar. Here was another blindingly good confection, the exhilarating sherbetiness of the citrus cutting through rich, buttermilk-yellow cream.

Next up, the velvety bittersweet chocolate mousse with its faintly smoky, cigar-box character, and the plush chocolate truffle with liquid caramel, for all the world like a posh Rolo. Paragons of balance, they showcased the intrinsic personality of the impeccable couvertures used, inhabiting a different planet from cloying, dyspeptic products with names like 'Death by Chocolate', best reserved for those with eating disorders. 'The acid test for me is that the last spoonful should taste every bit as good as the first,' says Moran. By this, and every other conceivable measure, all her 'Pots of Deliciousness' - Pods for short - are a rip-roaring success.

Catherine Moran is living proof of how a bright individual with sufficient nerve and a good idea can branch out into a new career relatively late in life. Contemplating being 40, and having worked for 10 years in an unrelated field as a medical writer, she decided to set up a business making desserts, starting with a classic chocolate mousse. Ironically, she says that she doesn't even have a sweet tooth, which probably accounts for the masterly restraint that makes her puddings work so well. 'I would never describe myself as a chocoholic,' she says, eschewing all the overheated prose that commonly surrounds this foodstuff, 'but chocolate mousse is one of life's fundamentals.' So she took herself off to do a course at the world's leading centre for everything chocolate, Valrhona's celebrated chocolate laboratory at Tain l'Hermitage in France.

Moran took the plunge in 2006, setting up as 'Sweet Stuff Slow' and making desserts in her farmhouse kitchen. This presented a number of challenges, not least getting health-and-safety clearance for using her own well water. An ingénue when it came to scaling up production, she started off with inadequate equipment. 'It took me all day to make 30 pots and the kitchen wallpaper was splattered with egg and chocolate by the end of it.' But quickly, she was able to make the transition from home cook to food producer because she was able to tap into the unstoppable momentum around good food in Ludlow.

This town and its hinterland is spilling over with small producers, excellent markets and thriving independent food shops. It pioneered the 'Local to Ludlow' label to support this enviable food network, and has recently become the headquarters for the UK wing of the Slow Food movement. Just as Moran's business had outgrown her kitchen, the new £2.5 million Ludlow Food Centre was starting up on the Earl of Plymouth's estate, creating an impressive production hub and retail shop to market produce from the estate, along with that of other farmers and growers in the four counties of Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Powys. A natural fit, Moran moved into its start-up unit and her production took off.

The Pots of Deliciousness range now ebbs and flows with the season, encompassing 30 different variants. There are Yorkshire rhubarb, Hereford raspberry, Bramley apple and local blackcurrant crème brûlées, gooseberry and blackberry fools, mainly with fruits from her own garden, a posse of chocolate variations such as Valrhona single-origin milk-chocolate mocha pot and praline mousse, along with white-chocolate panna cotta infused with cardamom, cheesecakes and a zingy berry medley.

Availability changes by the week and the season, but the principles stay the same. Moran uses only a small select group of ingredients, where possible, locally sourced. She makes every pot herself and has declared a fatwa on industrial additives and shortcuts, confessing that she has always had 'an almost unhealthy obsession with why something does, or doesn't taste good'. If she wanted to cut corners she could, for instance, buy a machine to blow air into her desserts, but she won't. 'I'm about real ingredients and real cooking techniques,' she says.

So she insists on stoning her own damsons, Microplaning her lemon zest and juicing all her own lemons. 'Industrial ingredients like juice concentrate, glucose syrup and preservatives knock out the flavour,' she says, and the cream - her Irish roots shine through here - is 'absolutely critical'. Moran sources this from nearby Bartonsham Farm, a family-run dairy. 'It has a particularly nutty quality, and sometimes it's so thick, it's hard to get out the bottle. Lots of cream is too watery.' She uses only hedgerow blackberries because she won't have any truck with the cultivated kind which she dismisses as 'blackberries on steroids', and tastes every batch of fruit, altering the amount of sugar constantly because fruit varies so much, depending on the variety and growing conditions. Whether it's damsons, raspberries or blushing rhubarb, she cooks them gently to keep them as whole as possible so that they deliver the requisite 'big burst of fruit in the mouth'.

Catherine Moran is a one-woman band who presides over temperamental, labour-intensive, handmade products. Her Pots of Deliciousness could never be mass-produced without losing the sense of place, person, and scale that makes them special. They make you realise just how wonderful Britain's embryonic local food revolution could be.

· Sweet Stuff Slow, Ludlow Food Centre, Ludlow, Shropshire 01584 856000, www.ludlowfoodcentre.co.uk. Pots of Deliciousness are on sale in Fortnum & Mason, at Ludlow, Cheltenham, Hereford, Bishop's Castle, Craven Arms, Kings Norton and Shrewsbury markets and in independent shops in the heart of England and South Wales.