That began to change when she switched to a vegan diet and discovered that vegan desserts weren't something that was readily available in Newcastle.

"I have been baking since I first went vegan about 13 years ago, just because there was nothing else available," Johnson says.

"I had to make all of my food for myself - because my parents thought it was just a phase I was going through - and I started cooking for friends, too. We used to have weekly picnics, so I would bake cakes and treats to take in to share around with them.

"They all told me how amazing it was and encouraged me to start doing market stalls."

She established a Facebook business page to promote her vegan baked treats online, which attracted 200 'likes' overnight, and paved the way for a baking business which she ran out of her home kitchen while juggling a part-time job, university study and, eventually, work as a high school art teacher.

That was six years ago.

She began taking orders for cupcakes and custom-designed cakes, quickly falling in love with the process of creating new flavours and mastering cake decorating techniques.

"I am all self-taught, but I did study secondary teaching and fine arts when I was at Uni where my major for my art practice was sculpture, so it's an extension from my artist practice to edible food art, I suppose," she says. "It's exciting to develop that into an edible form that people can get such enjoyment out of."

A year ago, she chose baking over teaching as a profession when the demand for orders had increased enough to require her attention full-time.

Last month, Johnson moved her baking business out of her home and into commercial premises at Charlestown to open Newcastle's first all-vegan bakery, Claire's Cupcakes 100% Vegan.

Funnily enough, the shop is located at a site previously occupied by another bakery.

"The shop is where the old Darby's was in the arcade. It's quite fitting that we've taken over the old bakery," Johnson says.

Everything in the cafe is vegan, including the coffee which is made on a base of various milk alternatives.

Cupcakes are her speciality.

She has more than 60 varieties on rotation, including this week's range of white chocolate raspberry (gluten free), chocolate honeycomb, banoffe pie, chocolate peanut butter pretzel, Top Deck, and her top-selling chocolate overload (gluten free), as well as red velvet, Golden Gaytime, and strawberry milkshake.

Johnson says it has been a lot of "trial and error" over the years to get her recipes up to scratch to find the right ingredients to replicate the experience of a standard cupcake which typically uses animal-sourced produce such as eggs, butter, and milk.

"My recipes are actually pretty simple," Johnson says. "It's not a list of 50 ingredients or anything, it's quite simple and uses natural ingredients. I did experiment with using quite a few of the different dairy free milks. I found that's soy milk was a really good option as it still gives you that light and fluffy cake crumb that you can find in a non-vegan cupcake.

"Also, because I do soy-free options as well, I found that oat milk is the best soy-free option. It still creates a beautiful soft texture in the cake. It's all been a lot of trial and error to find the right thing."

Johnson's day starts at 4am in the bakery where she makes all of the stock herself, baking around seven to eight dozen cupcakes during the week and up to 10 dozen on weekends (on occasions she has sold-out by 11am).

As well as cupcakes, Johnson makes fried doughnuts (cinnamon dusted and filled varieties), caramel, rocky road, and peanut butter slices, and "sausage" rolls.

Plans are in the pipeline to introduce a breakfast and lunch menu to include pancakes, waffles, bacon and egg hash brown burgers, and big breakfast-style meals.

She points out that you don't have to be vegan to enjoy her products.

"We have a lot of people that don't know we're vegan come in, that walk through the arcade every morning to get to work or to the shops, and a lot of the time when they find out we're vegan, or dairy-free or any of those things, it's actually quite positive," Johnson says.

"They are more than happy to try soy milk or almond milk in their coffee."