He spends months working on it.. Sacrificing his personal life. Shutting himself away from the outside world. Digging up body parts. Raiding morgues...

Grave-robbing aside, we're equally dedicated when it comes to getting this cookbook finished and out to you all. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, however, we won't bring to life a cobbled-together creature that makes us scream, flee in terror and become bedridden with exhaustion.

The bulk (the head and torso, let's say) was written before we reached our funding target. But there was (and is) more to do. Creating any monster takes time. Creating one with hand-drawn illustrations and original recipes (that actually work) takes longer.

We're spending every moment – between day jobs, dogs and looking after our own monsters, the littlest of whom arrived just before we achieved 100% funding – polishing our writing, fact-checking our theories and testing every recipe over and over again.

It'll be worth the wait, we promise.

In the meantime, we'll leave you with this much-debated line from Mary Shelley's introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein:

“[Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley] talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin… who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with a voluntary motion”

To which of Erasmus Darwin's experiments was she referring? Was she deliberately misquoting, or simply misremembering what she'd read or heard? Or was a wiggly piece of pasta really the inspiration for her novel? Either way, we thought it would be fun to include a recipe for 'Galvanised Vermicelli' in the book. It's one of our more playful recipes, with a vibrant green sauce packed with zingy herbs designed to enliven.

We'll be eating bowlfuls of the stuff to fuel our late nights and take us to the finish line.

Ella, Allie & Lee