A FEW days a week, so early in the morning that dawn is still a few hours away, a woman wakes to bake.

Jessica Cox is cooking up quite a stir with her new business, Baked on Green Street – named after the road she lives on in Redwick, Newport, but just a stone’s throw away from its border with Monmouthshire.

The 26-year-old only set it up in January after converting half her parents’ garage into her own bakery and she is already looking to expand.

She is also already a regular at food markets in Newport and in other towns and villages around Monmouthshire but is mooting whether to get a van to increase appeal and demand and use that to sell.

She said of the van plan: “I’ve been thinking about this. I could have the rest of the garage or do this whole van thing, which I’ve always wanted to do. And I think, why not? It’s very in at the moment. I would do it up snazzily. I’ve been looking around.”

But for now the business is ticking along very nicely and has expanded greatly because of popularity driven largely on social media, especially Facebook. She has just passed 700 likes on her page and her Twitter account has nearly 400 people tracking her progress.

Jessica started baking bread and selling it – not withstanding that she delivers it too in her Toyota, or sometimes with help from parents Deb and Rob – because she thought the idea of getting home delivered bread was original for South Wales. And so it has proved.

She got the idea from a passion she has had for some time.

She said: “I’ve always baked, I’ve always been into baking. I’d never really knew what I wanted to do. First it was with animals, then it was with child care and then that changed and then I went travelling for three years. I came home and I went to France to be an au pair. Every morning I had to get bread from the boulangerie. And then I thought: this is awesome, I’d love this at home.

“I’ve always been into cooking. I went home after [being an au pair] and I thought: right, I’d just try to get into a patisserie as an apprenticeship and I emailed loads of people but to be honest I think I was emailing random people.”

But after waiting for some time, she was eventually given a place as an apprentice at Cocorico Patisserie in Cardiff, where she learned skills she is now putting into practice. When the Argus visited, she had been making extremely intricate religieuse, French choux pastry cases.

Although bread makes up the majority of her business, she is still able to master sweet products.

One of her latest innovations – which has found a popular audience, not least on her social media pages – is Doughnut Wednesday. She started baking 130 of them initially but output has had to increase to more than double that.

She is now running a competition on her Facebook page in which people can design their doughnuts, which she will then take to her first food festival at Caldicot Castle at the end of this month.

Jessica said she is open to “crazy” designs and the proposer will have their name used in the doughnut design which will be sold at the Monmouthshire Food Festival on Saturday, May 30 and Sunday, May 31 on the Baked on Green Street stall as well as receiving six free doughnuts of their design.

But the work comes with long hours.

Of a typical start to her week, she said: “On a normal weekday I get up at Monday at about 2am. And then I start baking; I finish around (but it depends how organised I am) 7am. I will bag [the bread] all up and leave about 8.30am and I just start delivering. I do all of Redwick, then I go down to Magor, then Caerwent. By the time I get there I try to come back to Magor for 10am. Then I usually go to the bank and I come back to clean.”

And how long does cleaning take? “Ages! It’s a nightmare!”

Then she might go back home to Green Street at about 12.30pm and sort out orders. Sometimes she might take a trip to Tetbury in Gloucestershire, an 80 mile round trip, to buy flour from a mill there.

Among the places Jessica sells her bread to at the moment, buyers include L'Espressino in Magor, The Rose, down the road from her in Redwick, and the Caerwent Post Office.

Her prices are greater than you would pay down at the supermarket – it is being handmade and then delivered - but as Jessica said, people are increasingly keen to have good bread.

She said: “People say it’s a treat now; I think people are very conscious about bread.”

Among her loaves, a small spelt loaf costs £2.60, and a white loaf is £2.50; a multigrain loaf is the same price.

She has two ovens which can cook 24 loaves at a time and Baked on Green Street has had interest from people as far as Cardiff. But with limited capacity at the moment she is keen to keep the business at a scale she can manage until expansion plans are put firmly in place.

And she adds, sensibly, that you can’t rush bread, it needs to be delicately done.

For more information on Baked on Green Street visit Jessica’s Facebook page at facebook.com/bakedongreenstreet or follow her Twitter page, @bakedongreenst