ARAN Bakery

In a sash-windowed townhouse in a historic village in Highland Perthshire sits a micro bakery with a garland of dried setaria and starflower draped artistically above its front door. When you walk into the Scandi-white interior, you’ll likely hear laughter from customers and staff as they share stories over the counter. You may even have to join a queue snaking out of the door. ARAN Bakery is part of Dunkeld’s community, and is a daily pilgrimage for many. 

If you haven’t heard of the bakery, you may well know of its founder, Flora Shedden. At just 19, she became the youngest semi-finalist in the TV show The Great British Bake Off. Two years later, armed with crowdfunding, grants and help from family and friends, she opened ARAN in her hometown. The artisan bakery, whose name derives from bread in Gaelic, has since become so well loved that when popularity demanded an increase in production capacity, customers offered up garages and unused outbuildings. 

Production now takes place in nearby Birnam, allowing Flora to stock the No. 2 Atholl Street shop with more than would otherwise be possible – even so, the day’s fare tends to sell out by 3pm. Get there early and the shelves will be chequerboarded with trays of buttery croissants, celebratory cakes with dainty icing, pastries piled with fresh strawberries and sourdough breads with crackling crusts. 

All the products are an ode to good home baking and the recipes, as outlined in Flora’s two cookbooks – ‘Gatherings’ and ‘Aran’ – are designed for the domestic kitchen. The young entrepreneur has had no formal training and insists that “instinct not alchemy” goes into her work. Ingredients are wholesome and honest, with simplicity in place of scientific concoctions. You will find sugar on the list though, and this, says Flora, should be wholeheartedly enjoyed. “Cooking should be celebratory and bountiful,” she writes in ‘Aran’. “Let’s not do it half-heartedly.” 

You need to take time for it, too. To walk into the bakery is to enter baking time, to savour a slower pace and luxuriate in the aromas and tastes. You’re allowed to, and should, indulge.

Thanks to steady revenues from ARAN, Flora was able to open her second business amid the economic lockdown in July 2020. LON sits across the road, where it too wears quiet style (you can see that Flora worked as a gallery assistant before discovering her talent for baking). Its name derived from ‘sustenance’ or ‘provisions’, the general store stocks store cupboard essentials – jute bags of pulses, grains and cereals, and jars of biscuits, chocolate and jellies – as well as floral arrangements and everlasting wreaths. So make your pilgrimage to Atholl Street. Go there early, go with an empty belly (and don’t forget your shopping bag), and go with baking time