I always dreamed of opening my own bakery and it's more beautiful than I ever could have imagined

I always wanted to be a baker, or at least work in food in some capacity.

Half of my family is Irish and every time I went to visit my granny in Ireland, she'd teach me how to make griddle bread or soda bread and like different types of cakes. My Scottish granny was also an excellent baker.

I had some mental health problems when was younger and I found that baking was a really good outlet for me. I found it very comforting that you could open a book, follow the instructions, and if you followed them perfectly you had full control over the results.

So when I turned 15 I decided just to leave school and got a job as a commie chef in Edinburgh – and yeah, I haven't really stopped since. I was a chef for six years before I started working in pastry. I really wanted to be a baker - I tried all the bakeries in Edinburgh and they all declined my application because I was ‘under qualified’.

I was quite upset, so I started looking at options in England. I must have applied to around 20 bakeries before I got my first proper job as a baker in Macclesfield. Ten months later I started working at an Edinburgh bakery.

Darcie Maher, 27, opened Lannan bakery in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge in the summer of 2023 | Stephen Lister

Lannan in the making: Covid, a caravan and contacts

I had plans to travel to Australia, so I moved back to my parents' house near the Borders, took a job in a hotel, and started saving for the last bit of money I needed for my flight – but then Covid happened and I couldn't go.

I started renovating an old caravan in my parents' garden and turned it into a mini house and kitchen where I started developing recipes for different laminated pastries, sourdough and a lot of cakes as well.

I got quite a large social media following on Instagram because I was developing all these recipes in my caravan and I started to sell cakes to people in the local town just to keep me going.

Later, I got asked to make a croissant recipe for the Edinburgh Butter Company and through that I met Chloe Black, who is now my business partner at Lannan. She said we should open a bakery and we began working on that together. When we were making plans for Lannan, I took a stopgap job at The Palmerston and the owner said they wanted to come on board with me and Chloe as well.

I had a lot of customers in Scotland and around 25,000 Instagram followers who were sort of waiting and hoping that I was going to open a bakery - I would get messages about all the time - but it was never going to be possible without investors.

“It’s more beautiful than I could ever imagined”

The queues on the first day were insane - they stretched down the road to the school. There hasn't been a single morning that we've opened the door where there hasn't been a queue. And there's only been one or two occasions that we've had a few things left at the end of the day.

I have memories of being young and dreaming about opening a bakery, and sometimes I feel like I'm having an out of body experience because I'm living in the thing that I thought about as a child.

It's more successful and more beautiful than I could ever imagined - it really is. We started with four staff and now we have 18. We've just finished a renovation downstairs which has tripled our kitchen space and we have plans to open a café in the future.

Lannan bakery in Edinburgh can be found at 29-35 Hamilton Place | Stephen Lister, ZAC and ZAC, @studiohartofficial, @studiohartofficial

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But we’ll be doing the café in stages. Initially we're going to renovate the space without any furniture and use it as a collection point for pre-orders which we're going to start in summer.

I want to do it quite slowly because if it doesn't work as a cafe or if I think we actually need to keep it as a collection point, I want to have that option. An important thing about the pre-orders is I don't want to create another queue - I can't have another queue forming.

La Liste’s World Pastry Awards 2024

When I got an email to say I’d won the Pastry Opening of the Year Award I thought it was definitely a scam. I didn't look at it for ages, but when I sent it to my PR team they told me this was huge.

La Liste hosts the only awards in the world dedicated just to pastry chefs and I was the only person in the UK to win that year. I think there’s only one other person who's ever won it from the UK and they were from Harrods in London.

And to go to Paris and receive this award for pastry as a Scottish pastry chef was, I mean, I can't even describe how incredible that was. This was during Lannan’s first year so it was it was just completely mind blowing.

“People can experience Lannan in a more relaxed way”

When we first opened in July 2023 we were making 600 units a day, now it’s around 1,200 and will soon be 2,000 when we start doing pre-orders. It's a lot of pastry!

I was always a bit against doing pre-orders but I think it will open us up to a bigger demographic of people. There's a lot of people who wouldn't stand and wait in a queue - and I support that. So it would be nice to give people the opportunity to experience Lannan in a sort of more relaxed and steady way.

Looking back

I think it’s impossible to put into words what the last few years have been like. It's surpassed everything I ever thought it would be. And because I'm finally starting to do less shifts I think I’ll maybe be able to reflect a bit more.

In the beginning I was doing front of house, I was the bakery manager, I worked all the bake shifts and did all the laminating. I slept at the bakery sometimes and on occasions I would be there for 36 hours without even sleeping at all.

Last month was the first time I was able to take a step back and that’s made a huge difference because I’ve got a lot of other things going on with the business now. Everyone at the bakery is exceptional, especially my two managers - I don't know what I do without them, they really are excellent.

It's been the hardest thing I have ever done and probably will ever do, but it's been amazing. It really has.