“I don’t think you can just write a book,” says Una Leonard. “I think you need to have a reason behind everything that you do.”
For Leonard, author of the bestselling recipe book Sweet Therapy, the reason for a sequel came late last year when she was in the oncology ward of the Mater hospital in Dublin accompanying her mother, Pauline, to her chemotherapy treatment. Sitting there for hours, the pair were talking as they often would about life, family and Una’s business at 2210 Patisserie in Mullingar, where the baker and entrepreneur had found her niche selling cakes like, well, hot cakes.
A woman entered the ward with an unusual energy about her. “Joy was pouring out of her,” says Leonard. “There was this pep in her step.” When she was hooked up to the chemo drip next to them, she looked over and told them why: “It’s my last one.” If the moment was bittersweet for the Leonard family, it was also wonderful. The three of them talked about what the woman was looking forward to, when the effects of her chemo had subsided. “It was so simple,” says Leonard. “Being able to eat a slice of toast and taste it. Having marmalade again. Drinking a cup of tea. Not feeling sick. Her family were going to have a tea party to celebrate.”
When they were leaving, Leonard turned to her mother and said she knew what she wanted to base her new book on: celebrations and sharing moments, small and large. In the midst of familial anguish, she had found a motto she could grab on to: life is fleeting. Seize the day. “Nobody is guaranteed tomorrow,” she says. “But we have today.”
As Leonard tells this story, she is sitting at her desk in her upstairs office in her cafe and bakery, 2210 Patisserie, in Mullingar, with windows that look out on to the bronze statue of Joe Dolan in Market Square. A quick talker and fast thinker, she laughs easily and is a whirlwind of ideas. Before her is her new book: Good Together: Delicious Recipes for the Moments that Matter. A lavishly produced hardback, it’s full of practical recipes – from cheese scones to loaf cake – that are easy to follow and don’t make you feel a fool for not having some esoteric item in your kitchen.
Leonard has just relocated her business in Mullingar to a three-storey building bang in the town centre that was previously a bank. The facade has been painted pale pink in keeping with the 2210 Patisserie branding, and a delightful frosted pink chandelier adds vintage boho chic to the hallway. Stepping inside, the vibe is a hip coffee house by way of Downton Abbey: fringed lampshades, walnut-stained units, banquettes, ceiling cornicing like frosting on a cake, and chequered light and dark pink tiles on the wall that flanks the servers doling out almond croissants, bakewells and chocolate chip muffins.
“It’s very my style,” says Leonard. “The guys were like, ‘Are you sure?’ I was like, honest to God, it’s going to come together. We’re having a chandelier in Mullingar!” In the main area, echoing the sharing theme of the book, is a huge table, around which customers can sit. “The idea of that is to connect people around food and coffee.”
On Instagram, congratulatory messages have been flooding into Leonard’s business and personal accounts, where she has a following of more than 100,000 fans, who often drive long distances to sample 2210 Patisserie fare. “Immense work,” commented Bressie, aka Niall Breslin, who grew up in Mullingar, summing up the general supportive mood. Dressed in chocolate brown (nicely complementing the tones of her building), the 32-year-old fizzes with energy as she sits surrounded by well-wishing cards. “Estate agents are telling me it’s increasing the value of houses. It had been derelict for the last six years, I think.” She laughs. “I had to ask them: why am I getting bouquets of flowers off all these estate agents?”
It’s not hard to see why everyone is so interested. A new kind of celebrity baker, Leonard is beloved for her cakes – she has baked celebratory cakes for other well-known names including Doireann Garrihy and Pippa O’Connor – but she has made a lasting impression on the Irish public because of her decision to write and speak openly about her mental-health struggles, her eating disorder and battles with self-harm. Her book Sweet Therapy was a number one bestseller in 2022, and shortlisted for the Avoca Cookbook of the Year Award at the An Post Irish Book Awards that year.
In Sweet Therapy, Leonard wrote with disarming candour about the experiences she had been through growing up. She had had a negative self-image since her teens. She hated catching sight of herself in a shop window. She struggled to eat in front of people. “I did not want to be in my body,” she says. “I just wanted to fade away.” At school, if a favourite teacher wasn’t with her to get her through mealtimes, she often just wouldn’t eat. “I dodged food.”
In 2011, Leonard’s beloved grandmother Dotie, who lived with the family, died, having suffered with Alzheimer’s disease in the closing stages of her life. A relationship Leonard had been in had broken up. And she had just left the safe, earthing structure of her family home in Mullingar to study culinary arts at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. Living without her family, she felt unmoored and overwhelmed. “I just did not know how to cope with any of what life was throwing at me,” she says. “It was just a complete plunge.”
Money – the lack of it – added pressure. With three siblings, two of whom were already in college, funds were tight. “We were on Vincent de Paul vouchers at the time for Christmas,” she says. “I was working a full-time job and I was in college.” She stopped eating. Or if she did eat, she vomited her food back up. She suffered panic attacks, night terrors and memory lapses. Things got worse and worse. “I don’t remember so much of it,” she says. “Your brain forgets these things because there was such trauma. I wrote off a car because I hadn’t eaten in two or three weeks. I literally ran it into a wall on my way home from a camogie game. I blacked out. I hadn’t eaten in so long.”
In 2012 she tried to take her own life. In A&E, she says, “my sister held my hand. They gave me a piece of paper: ‘On a scale of one to 10, list off your mood’.” That style of self-determined care went on for months. She had to go to a rehabilitation clinic near Trim every Tuesday morning, again ticking a box to tell them how she felt. “There was nobody checking in on me, having conversations with me.”
Her family got her through. Every week her mother would send a text to the clan to say Una was safe. “She’d tell you: they were the hardest years of her life. Having to text my sister every Friday: ‘We survived another week’. She would sleep in the bed beside me or she would stop me from scratching and she’d give me gloves. She was by my side all the time. I was always safe with her.” Leonard wants to emphasise what that really means. “I tell my story quickly, because when you’re telling a story, you have like 10 minutes or less. But that’s 4½ years. She dropped everything.”
What helps a person recover from disordered eating? Leonard doesn’t have an easy answer. That’s why she doesn’t speak in schools or give talks. She knows that what anorexics are told not to do is often exactly what they will do, because their goal is the opposite of the one their doctors and carers have for them. “Their brain isn’t thinking, ‘Oh I need to get better’,” she says.
What worked for her, alongside the slow healing brought by time and the bedrock of support provided by her family, was distraction. At home in Mullingar, she started baking to keep herself occupied. Her nephew Conor asked for a birthday cake for his third birthday: a John Deere tractor cake. She spent weeks prepping and plotting the decorations for it, looking at YouTube instruction videos and using a small John Deere tractor as a model. Then while walking the streets of Mullingar in 2015, she passed a sign on a building that would change her life. “There was a sign on it, saying ‘€750, turnkey’, and I just went for it.” She called her new bakery 2210 Patisserie after her nephew’s birthday on February 2nd, 2010.
She laughs as she recalls those early days. “It was a tiny cafe. I was only 22 and couldn’t afford a table and chairs, so I remember going to the local St Vincent de Paul and paying €75 for a table and chairs and I painted them white. The first day brought in €11. It was three months before we turned €100 in one day. We were talking about it the other day. Mam said, ‘Do you remember when you used to go out with the tray of eclairs and give them away to people so hopefully they’d come back in?’”
Was it obvious from a young age that she would become an entrepreneur? “I’ve always been a doer,” she says. “If there was something that needed to be done, I’d get it done.” When the pandemic closed her cafe, she switched focus to an online model, selling just two items, a brownie and a blondie, delivered in a pretty pink box. Thanks to her growing presence on Instagram, the orders surged. People loved the idea of getting a sweet treat through the post. And they loved hearing Leonard’s updates too. It was a new way to connect with an audience, and she had a talent for it.
When Pauline was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, Leonard spoke to her followers about that, too, while sitting in the car waiting for her to have her treatment.
“Over the years, the updates – because it was always very positive – it was really easy. We used to be like, ‘Can’t wait to tell everyone, she’s doing really well’,” she says.
“We started working with the Irish Cancer Society, and we could see the good that was coming from it. Mam is one of those people that will always look after any charity. It’s just the type of person she is.”
There were other elements they both enjoyed. “She loved being recognised. She’d go to Aldi or Lidl, and people would be like, ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ Mam’s like, ‘Yes’. She loves it.” She pauses.
“This year, I probably gave two updates. We don’t do as many. It’s extremely difficult to share something that’s tearing you apart.”
Pauline’s chemotherapy treatment has come to an end now she is no longer responding to it, and a palliative care team are looking after her at home. From Pauline taking care of Una, the roles have now reversed. “We didn’t get long enough of me being well enough and her getting sick. She was 59 when she got diagnosed with cancer. It was originally breast cancer and within a couple of weeks it had progressed to a stage-four inflammatory cancer. She battled through all of that. It’s one of those things that just keeps coming back. But Mam is the most positive person you’ll ever meet. On the way to A&E with her two days ago, she was a 10 out of 10 in pain, and in that moment she was still telling the doctors and nurses [jokes], and making them laugh, and looking after them and making sure they were okay. She’s just amazing. And her humour gets her through everything. That’s her.”
A beautiful picture of mother and daughter laughing together is on the dedication page of the new book. “You are the one who holds us all together,” Leonard has written in tribute to her mother. “The link that cannot be broken.”
For Leonard, solace comes from her business. “Stress is things you can’t control,” she says. “Everything in here was controllable. This is my passion project ... a nice getaway from stress. It should be that your outside life [is] lovely, and your work life crazy. But it was the opposite for me.”
She has a regimented life now, as much for her mental health as her physical health. She exercises twice a day, and goes to sleep around 9.30pm. She gets up later than she used to, but still between 4am and 5am. “There’s a few things every day that I’m like, if I can tick [those] boxes, I’m happy. It’s being creative, getting out for exercise, spending time with family. They’re all the happy things.”
She no longer feels the need to be baking in the kitchen from 3am in order to feel she’s working hard: she has a growing staff of 30 and makes sure she’s deployed where she’s most valuable.
Other goals that are more amorphous – like meeting someone – are on the long finger at the moment, although she did go on a date recently. “The guy was pretty much having none of me because I was too intimidating,” she says. “My response is, ‘I’m not intimidating, you’re intimidated: that’s a you problem.”
Leonard has her own house in Mullingar, which she bought at 29, having saved money by living in a little apartment she had renovated adjoining her parents’ house for the previous seven years. “My lovely aunties are like, ‘We’re so worried because you’re on your own’, but I’m fine. I have my dog, George. There’s a strength you can build by being on your own. I don’t think there is meant to be anyone in my life right now.”
It’s obvious that what sustains her – apart from family and friends – are ideas. So many ideas. Already there’s another branch of 2210 Patisserie in Powerscourt Town Centre in Dublin. As we tour the new premises in Mullingar, she mentions future plans for the building: a home decor business, a yoga space, a meeting room, another kitchen where gluten-free food can be prepared. “I get energy from being busy,” she says.
It means a lot to her to have the new book in her hands, because so many of the recipes call to mind cherished moments from her own childhood – the baked Alaska her mother made for every birthday, and the apple tarts she secretly stashed away in case a visitor called for tea. “Food for me is memories. There are loads of Mam’s recipes in this. I’m proud I have it on paper,” she says. She cried a lot writing the book, thinking back to those days. I tell her that I made cheese scones with my own toddler using a recipe from her book, and afterwards we handed out the scones to the neighbours. The whole batch was wolfed in half an hour, with several kids coming back for seconds. She smiles.
“The idea of this book is exactly what we were brought up on,” she says. “Sitting around the table, and it doesn’t matter if you have the fanciest cake or mam’s apple tart in front of you, it’s the connection you have with people when you’re having food.”
Una Leonard’s chicken Caesar pasta salad
Una Leonard’s blackberry and almond galette
Good Together: Delicious Recipes for the Moments that Matter by Una Leonard is published by Hachette Books Ireland.
If you are affected by the issues in this article, the Bodywhys helpline is 01-2107906, and the Samaritans 24-hour helpline is 116123
