Our grandmother kept a sourdough starter on her windowsill for forty-three years. She fed it twice a day, named it "Albert", and refused offers from at least two bakeries who wanted to buy it from her. When she passed away in 2018, Albert came to live with us.
At the time, neither of us baked seriously. Anya was an art teacher; Mira ran a small graphic design studio. But Albert needed feeding, and we'd both grown up watching our grandmother work flour, water and salt into something that felt closer to magic than chemistry. So we started baking.
The kitchen table years
For most of 2019, we baked from our shared flat in Hove. Loaves on Saturday, cakes for friends' birthdays, croissants when we felt brave. We posted photos on Instagram mostly because Mira liked taking them, not because we expected anything.
Then a wedding planner saw a cake we'd made for a friend's birthday. She asked if we did wedding cakes. We hadn't, but we said yes. The cake was for sixty people. We made it in our home oven over three days, panicking the entire time.
We didn't sleep for two nights. Mira drove the cake to the venue at 4am with Anya holding the top tier on her lap. The bride cried. The mother of the bride cried. Then we cried.
That wedding led to four more bookings within a month. We bought a second oven. Then a third. By December 2019, we had a waiting list of nine months, and we were still working from the flat.
Finding the space
The shop on Brighton Lanes had been a barber for thirty years. When it came up for rent in early 2020, we made an offer the same day. Then COVID happened.
We took possession in April 2020 and spent the lockdown months stripping out the old fittings, repainting, installing the proper bakery equipment we'd been dreaming about. We opened in September 2020 with a queue around the block — most of them people who'd ordered from us during lockdown, finally meeting us in person.
We've been here ever since.
Why vegan
People ask this a lot. Mira went vegan in 2014; Anya followed in 2017. When we started baking commercially, it never occurred to us to do anything different. But the bigger reason is simpler than ethics: we think plant-based baking is more interesting.
You can't hide behind butter. You can't rely on eggs to do the heavy lifting. You have to actually understand what each ingredient is contributing and why. It made us better bakers, faster than we would have otherwise become.
We don't preach about it. We just try to make things that taste so good nobody asks "where's the dairy?"
Where we are now
Six years in, we bake about 200 loaves a day, 40 wedding cakes a year, and roughly nine birthday cakes every weekend. We employ three people besides ourselves: Tomás (head baker, brilliant at sourdough), Priya (cake decorator, formerly a ceramics artist), and Eli (mornings, weekends, the heart of the front of house).
Albert is still alive. He sits on a shelf in the back kitchen in a glass jar with a hand-written label. We feed him twice a day. He'll outlive us.
— Anya & Mira, Brighton