The first ‘Baker Boys’ project starts in Brixham at the Indigos Go Wild Adventure playground in Summercombe on Thursday 10th July. As Torbay’s oldest community adventure playground, Indigos Go Wild is also the first adventure playground in the SW to be awarded a Quality Assurance kite mark.

Forming a partnership between Play Torbay, Friends of Indigos Go Wild, and Encounters, the project is supported by Awards for All. It was inspired by the ‘Top Boy Bakers’; conceived and run by The Drawing Shed in Walthamstow, East London.

‘Brixham Baker Boys’ will see lads from the ages of 8-15 learning to work together and bake bread in an outdoor cob oven, and is running alongside a leather-works project for girls under the ‘Forgotten Crafts’ umbrella of projects at the site.

The boys will not only be baking for other children using the playground, but also for their families and sometimes an elderly neighbor and will collect recipies handed down through generations. They will use drama and written/ visual documentation to record their journey through the project, ending with a celebration where they will share their ideas and experiences about what it’s like to grow up in Torbay.

Using baking as a metaphor and under the guidance of Lead Artist Liam Hurley, an Encounters Associate, the young people will explore the potential for change and transformation, both for themselves, their community and the wider world. Alongside this they’ll be learning practical skills such as cob building, research skills and, of course, baking.

We are very lucky to have David Jones, Director of the Dartmouth Food Festival and owner and all round bread guru from ‘Manna from Devon’ in Kingswear, on board to mentor the boys. He’s an experienced cob cook and a dab hand in the art of baking bread, and is kindly donating his time, passion for baking and great expertise to the project.

The first sessions will be concentrating on repairing the old cob oven on site, mashing up the ingredients with our feet and applying with our hands to create the Baker Boys oven.

From then on we’ll be trying out various recipes on other adventure playground goers, catering for Lammas/the first day of the Harvest Festival and generally learning all about the process of baking food with fire in a cob oven.