Bake Me a Cat: 50 Purrfect Recipes for Edible Kitty Cakes, Cookies and More!

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Going for a big Chinese meal with my family for the Lunar New Year! It’s just so nice to have a massive meal together, and the fun of watching when everyone is getting really full towards the end, and everyone just telling everyone else to polish everything off! Mostly, I just love meals that have shared dishes in the centre, and you help yourself to whatever you want. That’s pretty much how me and my partner Nabil try to do every meal out. Having tastes of lots of different dishes is always better than having all of one dish. Unless that one dish is clearly the best of the lot! What dish do you make most often? Named after the reptilian bread she made on Bake Off, the title is “a metaphor about stepping out of your shell – having that armour up, which prevents you from being vulnerable and connecting with others.” You’ve mentioned in a couple interviews that you really started making friends through baking. Did you have your own baking club? What were the experiences you were thinking about when you wrote Yan? Eater: You’ve already published cookbooks, you’ve already written about yourself in other places. What made you want to expand into fiction?

My social anxiety has gotten a lot better and it’s partly been through saying yes to the things that terrify me the most. So I went to university and I was like, “I’ve just got to try and make friends, going to go out and do this and do that and join this board game club and keep trying to push myself.” I think Bake Off was basically the next extreme step.self-raising flour (to make gluten-free, substitute with a gluten-free self-raising flour blend, plus ¾ tsp xanthan gum) All the characters are lonely in their own way, and all experience their own issues, but it’s the baking that brings them together. So it’s about learning that just because you might seem okay on the outside, it doesn’t reflect your inside. I hope it’s a comfort to people who do experience anxiety, social anxiety or any kind of mental illness or mental health issues, or anyone who feels different and doesn’t quite fit in as well. There have been quite a few graphic novel cookbooks to come out in recent years, and it’s such a good way to bring you through a recipe and show you what you need to do without either a million photographs or trying to parse a really dense paragraph of writing. Note: You only need to make half the quantity of royal icing, as it’s hard to make a much smaller quantity and divide it up to create different colours. Any leftover icing can be piped out onto baking paper in long thin strands and left to dry. Once dry, chop up – and you have made sprinkles! Store these in an airtight jar.

There’s a film called Mary and Max, it’s a claymation film about a little girl who grows up over the course of the film. She has a lot of mental health issues and very low self esteem, and she gets a random phone number and starts a pen-pal relationship with this old man in America who’s autistic. In a way they’re totally different, but they also bring a lot of comfort to each other. It’s really dark and sad, but also funny. I love that film and I don’t think you see an intergenerational friendship that often. When I was making the ‘meowringue’ cats recipe on the actual book shoot, I realised that I could create a simpler and just as effective version for people who aren’t into piping, or are in a rush or have young kids who want to help. Chill the cake in the fridge for at least one hour, or in the freezer for 10 minutes until the buttercream is chilled and firm. Then cover the whole cake in another layer of vanilla buttercream to cover most of the crumbs. Use a palette knife (heating it under hot water for a smoother finish) to smooth the buttercream around the sides, then smooth the buttercream on the top, smoothing it in from the edges and towards the centre. (Make sure there is a little vanilla buttercream left for the decorations). Scatter sprinkles all along the bottom of the cake, then chill in the fridge for at least one hour again, or in the freezer for 10 minutes until the buttercream is firm.

I grew up with mental health issues, and still have social anxiety,” she says, explaining why baking can be such a soothing antidote during difficult times.