TradeNames: From 'heavy' Battenburg cakes to today's 'light' speciality breads, Peggy's Bake Shop has followed its customers' changing tastes, writes Rose Doyle

Billy Flynn is a baker. Baking's what he's been at since his mid-teens and baking was what his father, a chef in the army, did too. Billy Flynn grew up with 13 siblings, brothers and sisters both, and his father had him baking scones for the tea, and fairy cakes, from an early age. Billy liked baking, even then. Him becoming a baker had something of the law of natural progression about it.

"When I was growing up on Monkstown Farm (Monkstown) I wasn't very keen on going to school and mitched a lot." Billy tells how his life's course was decided as casually as it happened.

"A guy who used to come with a van selling bread around the area asked my mother if she knew anyone looking for a job. She told me I was going to work for him and that was that."

Billy didn't do much baking on that first job. An apprenticeship and learning the trade came later and, much later still, there came Peggy's Bake Shop on Glasthule Road, Sandycove where he's been for 35 years and where his breads, cakes and savouries have gained renown and customers who travel weekly from locations as distant as Brittas and north county Dublin.

He runs things with Geraldine, the wife he met when they were both 16 and at a "hop" in Sandycove. They married at 21 and had two of their four children by the time he started to work in Peggy's Bake Shop in the early 1970s.

Geraldine worked with him from the beginning. "I made it as easy for her as possible," Billy quips. Geraldine, non-stop busy, good humouredly ignores this. "We worked our way through the hard times early on," she says. Emma, the daughter who helps on Saturdays, just grins.

There's no mistaking the family effort, and goodwill, which goes into Peggy's Bake Shop. On a bright Saturday at lunchtime Billy has long finished the day's baking and the shop is filled with the hot, sweet smell of freshly baked dough and with regular customers collecting regular orders.

The high piles of brown and soda breads, the turnovers, Vienna rolls, plaited breads, pastries and tarts are all slowly reduced. Billy takes a warm sponge, layers it with jam and cream, ties it into a box and tells how he came to be Peggy's Bake Shop.

That first job was off the Merrion Road, the bakery a small place at the back of a house. Billy left when he found he wasn't learning anything, just washing pots and scrubbing floors. "I was about 15 and got a job with Seamus O'Reilly, a baker in George's Street, Dún Laoghaire, who trained me as a baker and confectioner. My father at the time worked in Cathal Brugha Barracks, in Rathmines, and used cycle there every morning. There was no glamour in being a chef then!

"A lady called Peggy Jennings owned this place at the time. She's dead now, God rest her. She started it in the early 1950s and used to travel here from Malahide every day. She did all the baking, with a couple of girls helping her, and reared her family out of here. She sold sliced meats, soda breads, sandwiches. She was a great woman. Seamus bought the business from her in 1976. I was working for him in Dún Laoghaire still and he sent me here to work with her in the months before he took over because he wanted me to manage the place. I'm here since then. It sounds simple, a natural progression. It was also a lot of hard work, then and now. Billy Flynn lives in Ballybrack, just 2.7 miles away, a non-stop journey when I'm coming in in the mornings, 6am on weekdays, 4.30am on Saturdays because of the orders on that day."

Seamus O'Reilly taught him old-style baking, an apprenticeship which has stood him in great stead. "We used make Battenburg cakes; squares with marzipan. You wouldn't sell one now. I've tried. Black Forest gateaux used be the thing too. Ten or 15 years ago I'd make 40 on a Saturday and sell them all. Now I make four and mightn't even sell those. The style of life and diet has changed."

Geraldine agrees. "People go out to eat on Sundays so they don't need to buy for desserts," she says.

Billy had a few specialities of his own which, sadly, have also gone out of fashion. There was his gateaux St Honore, profiteroles on top of a sponge base; his Gaelic coffee cake, coffee sponge soaked in whiskey, and his pear and sherry gateaux which was the same soaked, sponge goodness with pears crushed in cream. He'll make anything, once it's ordered, but finds people more often order whole meal rolls and the like these days.

Peggy's Bake Shop was a "very, very busy place" when Seamus O'Reilly took it over and Billy Flynn became its baker/manager. Alice, who had worked in Dún Laoghaire with Seamus, came and worked for 25 years in Peggy's Bake Shop.

"We introduced more cakes and savoury things," Billy says, "and after a while I got rid of the sliced meats and that. Too much messing involved. Basically, we've still got a lot of the same customers, and their children. People who go away come here when they come back to Dublin. We've got customers from Brittas and from north county Dublin, from Killiney, lots from Stillorgan and from Booterstown. It's not really the locals who keep us going at all."

Billy and Geraldine both say that Sandycove village, despite changes, is "much the same. There used be more kiddies shops, and two filling stations and a deli bar in a shop selling chickens. When a kiddies clothes shop called Hansel and Gretel closed it took a lot of people from the village. People would start queuing at 6am when it had a sale! Traffic is hectic now and customers find it hard to park. They put yellow lines too outside the shop, which doesn't help."

Bakeries did well, with Peggy's Bake Shop no exception, during the 1970s and 1980s. Billy, over a decade ago and "for my sins", bought the business from Seamus O'Reilly. He began making speciality breads, notably his wildly appreciated plaited bread and onion and tomato breads. "They're very popular," he says, as they disappear out the door, "I make walnut and rye too."

He tried readymix baking once, when Seamus O'Reilly worked for a firm importing readymix products. "But I'd rather make my own than just throw in water," he says. "I broke down what went into those breads; flour, mixed herbs, onions, tomato puree, pinch salt, some yeast. That's it. Mix it all up and you've got beautiful tomato bread. I don't buy in anything. I make everything. It's to do with quality. I eat it myself, why wouldn't I? I eat all my breads.

"Anything you buy in a supermarket is from readymix and they all taste the same. If I didn't make my bread myself no one would come to me. Customers want real bread. Brown bread is excellent for your health: I've bran and wheatgerm in my brown bread."

What about sharing a recipe with readers, I ask, but he laughs at the idea. So does Geraldine. "He won't tell you how he does it," she says. And he doesn't.

Business has slowed down a bit for bakeries, they agree. Lunches aren't being made for children any more, supermarkets are selling breads in variety, even if it they're readymix. But Peggy's Bake Shop will go on, and the discerning will go on buying quality bread. The four Flynn offspring, Emma, Cathy, Linda and David, are all, Billy says, "doing their own thing, they won't be getting up at 5am coming in here."

But he'll go on, with Geraldine, "for another few years anyway".