A home baker has gone viral for creating a toilet paper-themed cake.

Kate Pritchett, a public servant from Sydney, Australia, created the cake as she has had toilet paper “on the mind a lot lately” amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“I’d just been thinking a lot about how we’ve come to fetishise toilet paper and have made it distressingly out of reach for many vulnerable people who can’t stockpile,” she told the PA news agency.

Photos of the cake were posted to Twitter by Ms Pritchett’s husband Michael Harris, and they quickly reached more than 100,000 likes.

The cake, which took five hours to bake, is made of dark chocolate and a Japanese black sugar called kokuto, along with vanilla buttercream and mochi fondant.

Ms Pritchett, 41, said the attention the cake had received was “lovely but a little surprising; I make much more complicated cakes all the time!”

With stockpiling of some items being reported across the world, toilet paper has become an unlikely symbol of the coronavirus outbreak, with shortages in many supermarkets.

British supermarkets including Sainsbury’s and Tesco responded by limiting sales of essential items and introducing special opening hours for disabled, elderly and vulnerable customers.

Ms Pritchett told PA: “I’m really not making light of a situation so many people find difficult, but I do truly love how delighted people seem to be about cake.”