The purpose of this ‘breadsite’ is to share our love for real bread and our experience of baking it,  and to show that learning to bake and manage your own mini-bakery at home, while making a valued contribution to your community, can in fact, be surprisingly easy.

To jump to our Mini-Bakery Blueprint click here.

To see why baking real bread is so important for the community, click  ‘Beyond the village’.

Love Loaves is a home bakery run by Dragan and Penny in Wolvercote, a village on the outskirts of Oxford.  (See BBC film clip here) We started baking in our own kitchen, then converted our out-house into a bake-house that measures just 2 x 2 metres. We sell our bread through The Post Box, the local village store, which is close enough for us to literally walk across the street to deliver our crates of hot bread every morning, as well as through The Town Garden near the centre of Oxford. In the beginning we only sold bread on Saturdays, but demand for Love Loaves quickly grew and we now bake four hours a day, six days a week, averaging 40 loaves a session.

Why we started baking – and why we still do!

In early 2009, our jobs (Dragan is a professional magician and Penny runs a copywriting business) both seemed likely to be affected by the recession and we decided we needed a back-up plan.  We are both passionate about good food and we both love cooking for friends, so our Plan B  turned out to be ‘B for Bakery’.   Setting up Love Loaves has been a great way of making good food for a bigger crowd and although our ‘other jobs’ are both luckily still  thriving, the feedback from the village has been so positive and we love the bakery so much, we wouldn’t dream of giving it up.