It’s widely understood that not everything turns out the way you’d expect. Few know this better, perhaps, than contestants on the wildly popular competition show The Great British Bake Off, known in the US as The Great British Baking Show. Each week, they take a dramatic, sugar-filled journey across the uncertain and sometimes tumultuous expansion between what they planned to bake and how it turned out.

Cake sink. Buttercream icing splits. Isomalt shatters. Occasionally, someone forgets to turn on the oven, losing valuable time. But even if the sponge is “claggy” or “stodgy” (or god forbid, ends up on the floor before it makes it to a judge’s plate), there’s always a perfectly executed version of the creation viewers at home can ooh and aah at anyway.

That’s thanks to Tom Hovey, whose appetite-triggering illustrations have become a signature element of the show over the years. They’re presented on screen in a digital notebook on a mock worktop, as if the bakers had sketched them themselves.

“That points to why the illustrations are sometimes, a lot of the times, better than what it turns out in the tent, because it’s what they intended to create, not what they actually created,” Hovey said via Zoom from his studio in Newport , South Wales. GBBO’s 13th season is halfway through on Netflix. It’s already seen structurally questionable masks made of cookies; black pudding on pizza; and a coconut sponge that tasted “a bit like tanning lotion.”

Hovey, 39, has been making