Amalia Oblitas and Carlos Saucedo have big plans for the small bakery they opened nine months ago in Ferry Farm Shopping Center.

They'd eventually like to turn Pancito Bread, with its tempting array of freshly baked breads, savory empanadas and luscious desserts, into a franchise.

"This is a very good business. People like it very much," said Oblitas, a former architect who took cooking classes wherever her husband's job as an airport manager took them. "We're looking for investors."

The couple, who met and married in Bolivia, decided to go into business together after the contract for Saucedo's job at the Los Angeles airport was canceled. They and their children moved to Virginia, where he has relatives, and began looking for something to do so they could stay in the United States.

"My daughter and two sons like the United States very much," Oblitas said. "For me, the United States is a big country and there's more opportunity."

Starting a business in the United States would also win it more acceptance than one started in Bolivia or any of the other South American countries that Saucedo's job had taken them to, he said.

"When McDonald's goes into South America, the response is incredible," said Oblitas. "There are big lines every day to go to McDonald's. In Rio de Janeiro, people get dressed up to go to McDonald's."

Oblitas was born in Barcelona, Spain, to a Spanish father, who instilled in her a love of art and architecture, and a strict German mother, who encouraged her daughter's love of baking.

She can still recall the smell of bread dough rising on a table in her mother's kitchen, and a number of the desserts she now sells at Pancito Bread, such as her popular Black Forest cake, are made from her recipes.

Oblitas' family moved to Bolivia, where her father bought land and started a lumber business specializing in chonta, a dark brown wood used to make furniture and paneling. Oblitas finished high school there but didn't go on to college to study architecture until her two oldest children were in high school.

After graduation, she helped design self-sustaining housing projects where people could live and work. Wells provided water, and there were windmills atop the adobe brick houses to generate electricity.