These Dc-area Bakers Are Crafting Your Favorite Sweet Treats At Home

A bakery doesn’t require a cute storefront and glass cases brimming with sweet treats. With a cottage license, any enterprising baker can run a business out of their home kitchen. Here are four pros who craft everything from flower-inspired cupcakes to artisanal breads.

Capitol Jill Baking

Jill Nguyen

Call it carb diplomacy. When Jill Nguyen moved into her Capitol Hill rowhouse at the end of 2020, she brought homemade bread to all her new neighbors to introduce herself and her home bakery. She told them, “If you see a random person walking down the street with a brown bag, it’s not drugs—it’s just bread.”

Two days a week, the self-taught 32-year-old and her crew of four rotating helpers work in her 300-square-foot kitchen outfitted with a conventional oven, a bread oven, and a 32-quart spiral mixer. Bread day is Tuesday or Wednesday, when she typically offers three types of sourdough, a baguette, and slices of cake, perhaps peach Melba or chocolate stout with orange. On Sundays, she focuses on an ever-changing variety of baked goods: cinnamon buns, biscuits with honey and chili crisp, and chewy pretzel bagels.

Everything is preordered, and a neighborhood kid sets up a table outside Nguyen’s house, selling lemonade in the summer, apple cider in the fall, and hot chocolate in the winter. Folks in line to pick up their orders chat and admire one another’s dogs. “There is a sense of community and a vibe,” says Nguyen.

Dapper Fox Bakery

Alex Reponen

In another life, Alex Reponen was a CIA operations officer, “recruiting spies and stealing secrets,” as he puts it. But on the side, he was developing a passion for baking, which he started pursuing after leaving the agency in 2015. After working for the team who went on to open Pluma by Bluebird Bakery in Union Market, Reponen launched a cookie business of his own in 2020.

The 48-year-old follows the same routine every week. Monday through Wednesday, he transforms his “too small” Alexandria home kitchen into a bakery, utilizing every square inch of horizontal space to make roughly 25 batches of dough, which he sells as ready-to-bake frozen cookies in bags of six. Generally, he offers one flavor a week, such as cookies and cream, chocolate chip, and Heath Bar crunch. Since opening, Reponen estimates he’s sold a quarter million cookies. “That’s a lot of butter, eggs, sugar, and scooping,” he says.

Later in the week, he does cookie drop-offs throughout the area. It all feels a world away from his career in spycraft. “I get a lot more blisters and do a lot less typing,” he says.

Il Mulino Oltremare di Sargasso

Michael Kempner

Cooking for two decades at Obelisk, 2 Amys, and Etto ignited Michael Kempner’s love for wood-fired baking. Then came a life-altering stint at Elmore Mountain Bread, a highly regarded rural bakery in Vermont. After building a brick oven with a gabled roof in his Chevy Chase backyard, the 45-year-old began selling breads made with stone-milled flours in 2021, and it’s now his full-time job.

Every Saturday, he bakes 60 loaves, divided between a wheat-rye sourdough; toasted walnut; baguette-like filone; anadama, made with polenta and lightly sweetened with molasses; and whole grain studded with sesame, sunflower, and flax seeds. “It’s a juggling act of shaping loaves, baking, cooling, and then packing and labeling,” he says.

Kempner also turns out gleaming challahs, darkly caramelized canelés, bittersweet chocolate babka, and several cookies. At 3 pm, he opens his home for pickups of preorders and to sell any remaining goods: “It’s like a fourth-grade lemonade stand in my front yard—I have a little market table.”

Jam Sweet Bouquets

Jamaliyyih Perez

Since childhood, Jamaliyyih Perez has been sweet on baking. She tried to attend pastry school as a teenager in El Salvador but was too young. At 21, she emigrated to the States and started a family but kept accumulating baking gear and working on projects, such as creating the perfect tres leches cake for her young daughter and baking with the children she nannied.

During the pandemic, Perez got out her baking equipment and began watching YouTube videos about cupcake decoration, including how to create ravishing flowers out of icing. After much practice, she posted a picture of her floral cupcakes on Facebook. A friend asked if she’d make some for a birthday, and from there her business bloomed. “My abuelita taught me that when you cook, you put your heart into it,” she says. “The food tastes better because your love is in there.”

The 40-year-old cupcake artist offers four flavors—vanilla bean, chocolate, red velvet, and lemon with poppy seeds—each topped with vanilla buttercream elaborately shaped into hibiscuses, hydrangeas, poppies, and sunflowers. Her signature creation is a head-turning bouquet made with a dozen cupcakes. Customers order online and pick up their confections at her Arlington apartment.

This article appears in the April 2026 issue of Washingtonian.

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