5 MINUTES WITH NATALIE PAUL

How did your love of baking start?

“At the age of seven, the first cake I ever baked showed me baking would be my everything. I then worked in cooking and baking – pastry chef and wholesale baking – trying to find the perfect pastry niche for me to fit into. In the back of my mind, there lingered this memory of the cake shops I visited as a kid. I wanted to recreate the cream-layered cake, crisp brown pastry, pink-iced abundant shelves.

With this strong reminiscence, I opened the green door on Queensberry Street – a shop to be filled with cake to make folks feel that same way.”

What can we expect in your new book?

“More cake! More tips! More words! A new batch of recipes that I hope will become instant best friends with you, your mixer and oven. I wrote Another Slice with the first book in mind so you can mix and match crusts and fillings or cakes and buttercream between the two books. I call it Betwixt-trix. These new recipes also reflect a transitional time in my life – some shop bakes that I couldn’t fit into the first book like the most-loved cocoa sour cream layer cake and some home bakes that I have loved but were too fragile to box up in the shop, like the apple pie in buckwheat crust.”

What would your advice be to people who say they can’t bake?

“I don’t want to dispute anyone’s knowledge of themselves, but I whole-tartedly believe everyone can bake. Baking isn’t scary science, but you do need a little extra information and some rules as you transform eggs, butter, sugar and flour into an entirely new physical structure (cake). And my most hands down, unassailable, never-gonnachange my mind baking tenet is use scales and weigh everything – eggs, liquid, flour. It will enhance all your baking outcomes.”

‘Beatrix Bakes Another Slice’ by Natalie Paull, $50, Hardie Grant Books.