Oh, Crumbs: England native rises to the occasion with popular cottage bakery

“Hi, my love.” 

Don’t be surprised if Angelica James greets you with that short, charming colloquialism the first time you meet her. 

The Northport Village resident, originally from Kent, England, radiates kindness and warmth in person, driven no doubt in part by her British accent and casual use of “my love” when speaking to friends, family and first-time customers. 

Of course, my love. 
Anytime, my love. 
Thank you, my love. 

The expression, a perfectly ordinary (and not necessarily romantic) term in the UK, brings an immediate sense of familiarity to interactions with the increasingly popular home baker and owner of Oh, Crumbs, an organic, small-batch bakery specializing in sourdough breads, scones, cookies and more. 

From bodybuilding to baking bread 
James will likely meet you at her front yard bakery stand in an apron, her highlighted blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her nails are usually painted (gray or black) and on her left forearm pops a colorful tattoo: pumpkins and fallen leaves on a sunny field form a sleeve from just above her wrist to just below her elbow.  

James actually settled into the United States – and Northport – in the fall of 2022. “I fell in love with the colors, the colors were just beautiful,” she said, noting that the blue skies here were a welcome change from the grey and overcast skies common in the UK during the autumn months. Her tattoo, she said, is inspired by the New York fall and English summertime.

Her transition to America seems to have gone seamlessly. But baking wasn’t on her radar when she first arrived in the states. 

James traveled to America four years ago to bodybuild. For seven years, she competed in shows, some prestigious, in the UK. Then, “I thought, Oh, let’s try America,” she told the Journal in an interview at her home. James imagined she’d get a job in a gym, enter bodybuilding competitions and be part of a scene much bigger here than in England.  

“And then, none of that happened,” she said. “It’s so strange where you end up and where you think you’re going to end up. Because I never planned to do any of this.”

A big learning curve 
When James first moved to the states, she discovered she had food intolerances, mostly to breads, but was sensitive to many other “native” carbohydrates (ingredients imported from Europe didn’t bother her). She says it’s the pesticides used here, or how the flour was treated, that her system can’t handle. 

So she decided to make her own bread. “And with sourdough, it’s three ingredients: flour, water and salt,” she said. “And a lot of time and a lot of love.” 

After James got a handle on baking, she made her own starter. The slow, rhythmic process of feeding and shaping a starter requires precision and patience; it took James nine weeks to get to a point where she could use it for a proper loaf of bread. She estimates that between using the starter too early and other variables like oven temperature and the variety of flour used, she made hundreds of failed loaves.

“But then it all sort of started to work,” she said. One of the first signs that she was truly onto something was when her partner Toby, who doesn’t normally enjoy sourdough, took a liking to one of her boules (a rustic, round loaf). James began making loaves for herself and her family, and to give to neighbors. She became “quite good” at the art of breadmaking, she said. 

Dora: The mother starter 
A mother starter is the original, living culture of wild yeast and bacteria that all other starters or ferments are taken from. It is the source culture, the “root” that keeps going indefinitely. 

In sourdough, the mother starter is the main jar you maintain long-term. It’s fed regularly (“like a pet,” James said) with flour and water, and used to create smaller offshoots for baking. You don’t usually bake directly with the mother; instead, you take a portion so the mother stays strong and alive, ready to give a little of herself to future loaves at any time. 

James named her starter Dora. “She’s living. She’s a living organism. But she didn’t always look appetizing. She doesn’t smell appetizing,” she said. “And to think that bread is produced from that is kind of crazy.” 

Raising and maintaining a starter is a huge investment in time, in responsibility and, well, emotionally. “Like I said, it took me nine weeks to get my starter to a stage where I could make bread from it, where it was fermented enough to provide the levain to make the bread rise, make a great loaf,” James said. “So if you forget – for instance, you’re going away and you’re packing and you’re packing for children and you’ve got so much going on – and you leave that starter on the side, you’ll come back, and it would have died.”

Dora is James’ original starter, and has been alive since January 2025. 

While there are options for dedicated bakers who must leave their starter for a while (in Sweden, for example, they have sourdough hotels with sourdough babysitters), James said she needs to maintain ownership over her starter and has too many trust issues to just hand Dora over to a stranger: “I have to make sure she’s organic and what’s going into her is what I need to go into her. So I couldn’t personally do that,” she said. She puts Dora in the fridge when she goes away because it slows the fermentation down, “so you have a lot longer to fix her when you get back.”

Care, intention and a whole lot of heart
In May of 2025, just four months into Dora’s existence, James participated in a neighborhood garage sale of sorts. She softly launched Oh Crumbs, The Bakery from a small stand on her front lawn. The bakery stand has been out every weekend since. 

“I just thought it would be a thing I did over the weekend,” she said. “I was like I’ll bake on Friday, put some things out on a Saturday… and then there were a lot of people who asked for bread and I was selling out.” 

So James began to take pre-orders, a system she says is much more efficient: “You can plan what to make, you know what’s popular,” she said. Collections of her same-day bakes take place on Wednesdays and Fridays or over the weekend if customers want to pick their order up from the stand. “I feel like I haven’t stopped since May, which I’m grateful for,” she said. 

Oh, Crumbs items have been available at Moksha Cafe (formerly Portofino) in Northport Village since the bakery’s inception, and James is working on an upcoming collaboration with Diana Chan, co-owner of the crowd-pleasing Chinese-Taiwanese restaurant Mama Chan’s, on a dessert. This weekend, she’ll launch a brand new website and a subscription-based “Bread Club,” adding even more structure to her workday. 

With her business growing at a fast pace, James now dedicates Mondays to developing her social media presence and is considering offering local delivery in the near future. Her fully licensed cottage bakery has taken over her home kitchen and (former) dining room, and the work continues. She installed two more ovens (for a total of three) in August/September, and is now housing in her space two refrigerators and four mixers. A stainless steel working table is being installed any day now. James even bought new all-day support shoes that accommodate how much standing she’s doing, sometimes baking for 14 hours a day.

“Back in May, I opened Oh, Crumbs with no real expectations beyond a love of baking and passion for nutritious, healthy ingredients and a small hope that people might enjoy what I was creating,” James wrote in a recent social media post. “What I didn’t anticipate was the kindness, encouragement, and support that followed. From the very first order to the many that came after, each one has meant more than I can say…Your support has allowed me to do what I love: create honest, comforting food made with care, intention and a whole lot of heart.”

Back to life
Settling into this new groove, and adjusting to a career she hadn’t ever imagined, took a little time but James remains grateful. “I’ve got my recipes now, I know what I’m doing,” she said, joking that in the beginning stages of Oh Crumbs, she had to taste everything – her cookies, the bread and bagels and scones and seasonal specials – to make sure they were up to her standard. “I don’t have to taste anything anymore,” she said, smiling. 

James appreciates the word of mouth her baked goods have garnered and loves interacting with her customers. While in the kitchen baking or cleaning, she’ll often run out to say hello when she sees a customer or neighbor pull up. She likes to walk to the harbor any chance she gets, no matter what the weather, and is slowly breathing some “me time” back into her life. She’s even joined a gym, Revolution Fitness, and plans on participating in a bodybuilding competition as early as April. 

Baking has only expanded the sense of community she discovered when she first arrived in Northport. 

“I couldn’t imagine moving back to England. I really couldn’t. I love it here,” she said. “It feels so much more like home than England did. We’re so lucky with where we live. It just feels like such a grounded and inviting kind of place.”

To learn more about her business and baked goods, and for menus, updates and more, follow James and Oh Crumbs, The Bakery on Instagram.