Tanya Burr is what we call in the industry, 'a jolly big deal'.
She’s got a make-up line, 3.5 million subscirbers on YouTube (her husband Jim Chapman has 2.5 million), her debut book Love, Tanya sold nearly 20,000 copies in the first week and the queue of people that showed up to her book signing for her NEW book Tanya Bakes in Norwich on Sunday took one minute and fifteen seconds to walk past.
Tanya Bakes is a collection of recipes for sweet toothers. It’s filled with recipes that she’s got from both her family and friends, and ones she’s made up herself and, it’s with relief that we report, that they’re all nice and traditional. Save for avocado in a brownie, there’s not a flax seed, kale leaf or quinoa grain in sight.
We caught up with Tanya about how she put the book together.
Hello Tanya Burr! Did you get sick of eating all the sweet stuff when you were putting this book together?
No! Weirdly there wasn’t. There probably should have been but there wasn’t!
You are my cake hero. Where did all the recipes come from?
Some are ones that have been passed down through my family and some of them are my own creations that I made up. Some are my nanny’s recipes, I’ve even got a couple of my best friend’s mum’s recipes in the book!
Did Jim Chapman help you out?
Jim was my guniea pig. He had to try things so mnay times. He ate so many horrible like, too much coconut oil in them brownies. He did make me thank him though. When I was writing my acknowledgements he made me write ‘thank you Jim for being my chief taste tester’.
How many bags of sugar did you go through?
Oh gosh. Probably hundreds.
Was there any recipe you weren’t fussed about that turned out to be amazing?
My peanut butter cup. They are amazing and actually better than the place that inspired them!
Wow nice work!
There’s a café near where I used to live and I wanted to recreate their recipe but they’ll never tell anyone their recipes. And they’re really expensive. I was spending a fortune in there so I was like right ‘I’m going to make peanut butter cups’ and they were better than the ones from The Good Life! I put ground almonds in with the peanut butter.
That sounds dreamy. What was the hardest recipe?
Oh the ultimate celebration cake*. When you do a professional book with Penguin, all the recipes get tested by a professional anyways so if I’ve messed something up they test it. This was the one cake recipe that I couldn’t make myself because I was away and there was a deadline on it. Tamara who did the cake testing emailed me and was like listen – ‘this just isn’t working’. I had wanted melted Mars bars in the butter icing and she was like it’s not very nice, it’s going really weird. I was away and emailing her going ‘Oh no! How can we incorporate Mars Bars?’ We ended up cutting them into spikie shapes and balancing them on top of the cake.
*This is the last cake in Tanya’s book and it is pretty fan-dabby-dozy looking. It’s got sparklers on it and everything.
Phew! Did you have any huge disasters?
Oh gosh. I don’t have any red velvet in the book and it’s probably because of this. I went to bake a red velvet cake and it came out of the oven and it was green! I was like ‘what is going on. Oh my God!’ All I put in was red food colouring. It was so funny.
It’s nice that your book isn’t super duper healthy – do you worry about clean eating?
It’s all about balance. I could never do 100% clean eating all the time. We all need that balance. I try and do the 80/20 rule. 80% you’re eating as healthy as you can and the other 20% you can have stuff from my book!
Tanya Bakes by Tanya Burr is published by Michael Joseph, £16.99
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.