Cartoonist, baker, author: TikTok star achieves book-writing dream

A baker who has won hundreds of thousands of followers on social media while pursuing her dream of landing a book deal said she just likes to "share the fun" of baking.

Tat Effby said she fell in love with baking as a child, but ended up working as an advertising copywriter and cartoonist before combining all her skills - and dry sense of humour - together and finding online fame as The Caketoonist.

Along the way she has overcome cancer, knockbacks from publishers and multiple rejections from the Great British Bake Off.

But after years of creativity and hard work, Bake Your Sweet Time was published this week, packed with recipes, beautiful illustrations and her signature wit.

Effby, of Shrewsbury, said it felt like she had been "baking forever" but spent 15 years in the advertising business before she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

At that point she said she considered going back to her old job, but instead "decided to pick up a pencil and remember how to draw".

It led to her finding work as a cartoonist, first for a local magazine and later for the Guardian and Private Eye.

In 2020 she also came runner up in a competition run by The Observer, for her cartoon, "Cancer Sells".

It was a look back at her own experience with cancer, exploring the dark humour.

"Even in the darkest moment this doesn't abandon you", she said.

Not long after, Effby started pitching books to publishers, combining her humour, cartoons and baking, but was met with rejections.

Agents repeatedly told her she would need to "build up an audience" so she took her baking online.

"I would happily bake every day three times a day, so if I could share my recipes and share my fun in doing it I knew I would have an endless source of content," she said.

Since then, her joke-filled videos have won her more than 400,000 followers on TikTok, 100,000 followers on Instagram and 43,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Over the last four years she said she combined that with constantly pitching book ideas that were turned down.

"That's just par for the course really when you're creative," she said.

"Most of your life is spending putting your heart and soul into something."

Rejection is something Effby said she has got used to, after failing five times to be selected as a contestant for the Great British Bake Off.

Those ambitions have come to an end now, because people who make a living from baking are not allowed to enter.

In the end she said that was "a relief to be honest".

But her book-pitching persistence paid off when she landed a deal to write Bake Your Sweet Time.

She spent the next six months concentrating on writing content, including cartoons, and the book was finally launched on Thursday.

"The end goal was going to be the book, but what I've ended up with was quite a big audience on social media," said the baker.

She described this as an "added bonus", but admitted it took a lot of hard work, because she was not one of those people who could "just pop a camera in the corner" and start filming.

Work as an online content-creator could also be lonely, she said, because of all the decisions she has to make for herself.

"You're always creating things speculatively. There's no right answer to this and no one can tell me this is what you should be doing."

But she has been helped along the way by the "amazing people" she has met online, a lot who are women of a similar age but a younger audience too.

The social media presence will continue following the book launch, but it's not something that will last forever, she said.

"I don't really want to be fooling around in front of a camera for the next 10 years."

Effby is also making time to spend with her mother, who is undergoing her own cancer treatment.

Together, they have been working their way through an old Be-Ro cookbook and have gone right back to the start, baking recipes from her childhood.

She said she remembered becoming obsessed with trying to master macarons during her own cancer treatment and said: "There is a lot to recommend a bit of baking during a very crappy time."

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