Internet star launches cookbook with homemade recipes

In the book, Li provides as detailed a recipe as possible and, at some key step, she will also add an explanation for "why we should do this and what will happen if we don't".

"I hope readers are not just learning how to replicate a dish, but by working through the book, they begin to understand the knowledge of hierarchy in cooking," says Li.

She had to figure it out herself in a 2-square-meter kitchen when she was working in England back in 2010. It was there that she started her cooking blog "Amanda's small kitchen", sharing her experience of making homemade dishes.

"It was not actually a real kitchen," Li recalls, "it was actually transformed from an aisle between the bedroom and the living room."

Li bought a camera to take photos of her cooking to share on her blog, but in 2013, she started to learn how to make videos using the camera.

After uploading a dozen cooking videos, Li saw an uptick in the number of people following her and reading her blog. She named her show man shi man yu－"the first 'man' is from my English name, Amanda, and the second 'man' means slowly in Chinese, which refers to the fact that I talk slowly on my show," Li explains.