Yellow Kite whips up second cookbook from Katarina Cermelj

Yellow Kite has bought The Elements of Baking by award-winning cookery author Katarina Cermelj. 

Nicky Ross, editorial director at the Hodder imprint, acquired world rights in a deal brokered by Laurie Robertson at Peters, Fraser & Dunlop. Yellow Kite will publish The Elements of Baking on 3rd October in hardback in the UK, with Mobius publishing on 8th October in the US.

Yellow Kite said: “In this definitive guide to making any recipe gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, vegan or even gluten-free vegan, Cermelj (armed with a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry) lays out the science behind baking and the ingredients that make it work.

“With an abundance of mouth-watering recipes, together with actual quantitative rules that you can use to convert recipes into whatever free-from version you fancy, The Elements of Baking promises to redefine the way we think about ingredients.”  

Cermelj is a cookbook author, food writer, photographer and creator of the free-from baking blog “The Loopy Whisk” (boasting around 1.7 million Instagram followers and 1 million on TikTok). Originally from Slovenia, she moved to the UK for her undergraduate studies in Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and then stayed on for a PhD and wrote her debut, Baked to Perfection (Bloomsbury), which won the Fortnum & Mason Debut Cookery Book Award and the Guild of Food Writers Specialist Subject Award in 2022.

Ross said: “Whether you’re looking for free-from recipes or you just love baking, there is nothing like it on the market. Kat is a phenomenon, and her Loopy Whisk blog is the go-to place for free-from baking know-how and recipes.”

Cermelj said: “I’ve loved writing this book – as a chemist turned recipe developer, I find the science of ingredients and free-from baking endlessly fascinating, and developing a fail-safe set of rules that will allow readers to adapt their baking with guaranteed success has been such a fun challenge. And even though this is an enthusiastically nerdy cookbook, the science in there isn’t difficult or scary – it’s the delicious kind of science that results in perfectly gooey chocolate chip cookies and squishy cinnamon rolls.”