The world’s loveliest baker serves up strawberry cupcakes, mango and coconut Victoria sponge, and great dollops of joy – while in her new series, Mary Berry offers comfort food Parisian-style
She’s poetry, is Nadiya Hussain. Poetry. Specifically, that bit about “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ / – that is all ye know on earth, / and all ye need to know.” Keats hadn’t met the 2015 Bake Off winner turned television cook and documentary presenter when he came up with this excellent insight. But if he had I’m pretty sure he would have chucked the Grecian urn he was pondering at the time and built his verse round her copious charm and luminous loveliness instead.
TL;DR version – I’m a fan. My adoration of the baker knows no bounds. I cannot even think what they might be, because – have you seen her? Have you watched her do her bake-y thing? Have you seen her radiate joy like a lantern, reach across time, space and screens to confide, cajole and charm by turns? Everyone who succeeds in gaining and maintaining a public profile of this nature has this ability in some measure, but she is the only one to have it in pure, unadulterated form. She’s a gift to television and possibly the nation. When it comes to keeping hope alive in these absurdly horrific times, she is my alpha and omega, and I exaggerate only slightly.
