Tanya Burr's New Book - Interview

Tanya Burr is a make-up queen, mastering the art of eyeliner. Her YouTube channel is now at 3.5 million subscribers but did you know she is also an amazing baker on top of all that?

This article is originally from The Debrief and was adapted. Recently Tanya Burr released Tanya Bakes after Love, Tanya sold 20,000 copies and that was only in one week! This new venture is a series of recipes for serious sweet toothers. Family and friends have contributed to this book and she’s included ones she’s developed herself. You’ll also be pleased to know there is no kale or seeds you’ve never heard of either just plenty of salted caramel cheesecake, flapjacks and her Grandma’s apple pie. Another delightful part of this news is that The Debrief got the chance to catch up with Tanya about how the whole book came 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? (Tanya’s husband)

Jim was my guinea pig. He had to try things so many 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.

Amazing good 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 most difficult recipe?

Oh the ultimate celebration cake*. When you do a professional book with Penguin, a professional tests all the recipes 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 fabulous looking. NOTE: It has sparklers on it.

Phew! Did you have any big 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 really super 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! Buy: Tanya Bakes by Tanya Burr is published by Michael Joseph, £16.99 or buy it on Amazon