In the Mood to Bake with Alex George of Lily P Crumbs

She named her brand after her geriatric dog. She started her Instagram account while in chemotherapy and called it Cooking with Cancer. She photographed her own cookbook in her parents' basement with the help of her mom's mahjong friend Karen, a hobby photographer in her 70s who ended up with photos on the back cover of the finished book. And she has never once paywalled a recipe because she learned to bake from bloggers who were generous enough to share everything for free.

Alex George is the founder of Lily P Crumbs and the author of In the Mood to Bake, a cookbook that comes out September 29, 2026 and is as warm, whimsical, and genuinely joyful as everything else Alex has ever made. The brand is named after her beloved dog Lily P, who lived to 21 years old. The cookbook is a love letter to nostalgia, creativity, and the belief that knowing the rules is just the beginning of knowing how to break them.

In this episode, host Sarah Perkins sits down with Alex to chat growing up in the 90s Googling baking recipes on the one family desktop, majoring in public policy and interning on Capitol Hill, becoming a TV news reporter in Tennessee who filmed herself, to being diagnosed with a rare cancer at 22. From starting a baking Instagram account in the hospital to slowly and methodically building Lily P Crumbs over nearly a decade, through multiple jobs and a graduate degree and a COVID lockdown she had just emerged from a year of chemotherapy to experience. To a cookbook deal she almost did not pursue until her best friend Sam told her she would regret it forever.

This is a conversation about baking as a love language, about building something slowly and with your whole heart, and about what it means to decide that if you are lucky enough to get more life, you are going to do everything you were too scared to do before.

In this episode, we cover:

Growing up in the ‘90s and early 2000s and the dawn of baking bloggers like Sally's Baking Blog and Cupcakes and CashmereThe one family desktop, waiting for her brother to finish playing Backyard Baseball, and Googling how to make a cupcakeA middle school layered brownie cake for her best friend's brother's graduation that she genuinely thought she inventedMajoring in public policy at college, interning on Capitol Hill, and gravitating toward storytelling and journalismBecoming a TV news reporter who filmed herself, set up her own satellite, and walked in front of the camera all at onceBeing diagnosed with a rare canc