The Great British Baker Nadiya Hussain rose from baking show champion to Netflix star, and wants to spread her love of baking to you BY MARY SUBIALKA
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adiya Hussain’s smile and excitement are infectious. “For me, baking really is my happy place, and I want it to be yours, too,” she says at the beginning of her new Netflix series, “Nadiya Bakes.” Her ability to draw in the audience— not to mention her impressive baking skills—has brought Hussain a long way since winning “The Great British Baking Show” in 2015. After taking home the trophy as the top amateur baker in the U.K., life changed quickly for this mother of three young children. Born on Christmas Day 1984 in Luton, a town a little more than an hour’s drive north of London, England, she grew up in a lively house with her parents, who had emigrated from Bangladesh, and five siblings. After marrying her husband Abdal in 2005, they moved to Leeds a few hours farther north. Having no formal cooking training, it was there that she first began to hone her baking skills. After her youngest child was born in 2010, Hussain worked on her college degree through the night feedings, nappy changes, nursery runs and long days, she says. “Life progressed, but my desire to get my degree never left me, so when the kids went to bed, I worked
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on my degree and when I felt stressed, I baked. I was baking my way through my degree on my path to become a social worker,” Hussain shares on her website. She “forced” Abdal to sit through many cooking and baking shows: “I would sit quietly and observe techniques and get familiar with alien baking terms. He would sit through each episode and shout at the box, ‘Nadiya, you can do that!’ And I would ignore him.” He downloaded an application to “The Great British Baking Show,” and she took a chance. Since winning the show, Hussain has written 14 books—including cookbooks for adults and children, picture books and a memoir—and has appeared in television shows such as “The Big Family Cooking Showdown” for BBC2. Her first cookbook, “Nadiya’s Kitchen,” hit the bestseller lists in 2016, as did her cookbook for children, “Nadiya’s Bake Me a Story.” In “Time to Eat,” published in 2019, she shares tips for making meal prep as simple as possible, including repurposing leftovers into new recipes, creating second meals to keep in the freezer and using shortcuts such as frozen foods to reduce prep time.
