The hole-in-the-wall Liverpool bakery where customers ring a bell for pastries!

Bakesale is now based on Roscoe Street, off Berry Street, Liverpool.

One of Liverpool’s most popular independent bakeries has moved to a new city centre location, creating a hole-in-the-wall hatch where customers ring a bell for pastries!

This is the first solo site for Bakesale, which was started by Jess Gartland in 2020 when she was furloughed from her chef’s job.

On Roscoe Lane, off Berry Street, the shop sells a regularly-changing range of pastries, cakes, savouries and sandwiches baked fresh there every morning by Jess.

Seasonal Danishes, featuring whatever fruit is best that month, are a big hit, along with cardamom buns which use croissant off-cuts and stout rarebit twists which are made with stout from the local Black Lodge Brewery.

Although it’s only been open for a few weeks, new customers and long-standing fans have already made it a sell-out on most days.

Bakesale moved to the converted warehouse building after a year at Bunch Wine Bar on Berry Street. Jess says it was a risk being off the main road, but the gamble is already paying off.

“When this opportunity came up, it gave us the chance to be stand-alone for the first time and there’s a real community in here.

“We moved it at the end of last year and knocked a hatch through the wall, but then we opened on the week when it was -4degrees and it was so cold we wedged the bell in the hatch so we didn’t have to keep it open!

“We did a trial week before Christmas which went really well and it’s been growing so hopefully more people will keep finding us.”

For 35-year-old Jess, who lives in Toxteth, Bakesale was never meant to be a business, more of an extended hobby during lockdown.

She’d previously worked at Oktopus and Buyers Club, followed by a spell in Denmark  with well-known bakery Hart Bageri before returning to Belzan on Smithdown Road. 

When hospitality restrictions in 2020 meant she had to be furloughed, Jess decided to bake more from home, setting up a Bakesale Instagram aimed mostly at family and neighbours.

“I did a little menu and posted it on Instagram,” she says. “It was super-cheap but it was something nice to do and I liked that people were able to taste the things I wanted to bake. People started ordering and it just spiralled from there.

“After furlough I went back to Belzan because it was never a plan for it to be its own thing, but then there was a second lockdown, I carried it on, and there was a point where I realised it could be something.

“I was doing about 60 hours a week in the restaurant, I’d finish at midnight and go to Tesco Mather Avenue to buy all the stuff I needed then I’d get up first thing and start baking.

“I was still on maternity leave after having my daughter Margot when Chapters of Us asked me if I wanted to do a little pop-up. That went really well and they asked if I wanted to do it permanently.

“It was a bit scary because that was the real jump but they were great, but unfortunately their business didn’t last so I had to move on.”

Bakesale has had a few different city centre homes since, but Jess’s business ethos and the way she runs it has stayed the same.

She arrives at the Roscoe Street bakery at 5am every morning, Sunday to Tuesday.

“I’m up at 4am, trying not to wake anyone up, then I come in and get the oven on. The dough has been proving from about 3pm the day before and when the pastries come out of the oven, we make sure everything’s looking good and put them on the shelves ready to open up. 

“After that I’ll do prep through the day, and bake bread for the sandwiches, and we stay open until about 3pm or until we sell out.

“One of the things that’s most important to me is that we don’t cost the earth so I try to keep prices down as much as possible. It’s tough for restaurants and bakeries to do that now because we’re facing the price of ingredients going through the roof which has hit everybody hard.

“Chocolate for instance has quadrupled in price so the same bag of chocolate that we could buy for £35 is now £140, and cocoa powder last year was £12 now it’s £24. 

“The other thing we always try to do is use little indies and local businesses where we can. As well as the Black Lodge stout, our coffee is from Assembly in London, you can trace it back, we use local butter for pastries from The Estate Dairy in Cheshire, and our milk comes from Peckforton Farm in Cheshire. 

“All of that can cost a bit more but I think people will pay for quality and it’s important to help keep those industries in business.”

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