NADIYA Hussain won the nation’s hearts along with the Bake Off trophy last summer.

A year on, she’s celebrating the launch of her first cook book, Nadiya’s Kitchen.

She has made the Queen’s 90th birthday cake, and has her own TV show in the pipeline - the brilliantly titled The Chronicles Of Nadiya - exploring her Bangladeshi food heritage, but Nadiya isn’t about to jump on any new food fads or harsh healthy eating regimes anytime soon.

“I don’t do fat-free, sugar-free, gluten-free, because that means flavour-free, and I like flavour,” she tells Taste.

“I love chips and I like carbs and I like to fry things every now and again - and I like green things, but it has to be with something that’s going to fill a hole,” she says, warming to her theme. “I’m all for being healthy, but ‘clean eating’ is not something I can ever see myself getting into, because I’m a cook and I love eating.”

Characteristically frank and open, Nadiya beat fellow bakers Tamal Ray and Ian Cumming in the BBC’s 2015 Bake Off final, thanks to a combination of pure charm, fantastic facial expressions (“I didn’t know my face did that by the way,” she admits with a laugh), and a knack for inventive bakes that sent saliva ducts up and down the country into overdrive.

The Luton-born mum-of-three, who wed husband Abdal in an arranged marriage when she was 19, struggles to get her shopping done these days without being accosted by affectionate fans.

“Everybody I meet is always really positive and somewhere in the sentence there’s always, ‘We’re really proud of you’, and for people I don’t know to say they’re proud of me, that’s a big deal.”

Most impressively perhaps, this is the woman who made Mary Berry cry on national television.

Nadiya, who now lives in Milton Keynes, still talks to her Bake Off alumni almost every day and regularly sees Mary, while she often turns to Paul in times of bread-related need: “I’ll ask him advice on a sourdough that’s gone horribly wrong and he’ll help me. It’s not bad being friends with the best baker ever.”

Weirdly, she might be the queen of Bake Off, but she’s not overly fussed by cake itself.

She prefers savoury to sweet, but explains: “My family, they’re all into savoury cooking, but I’m the only one that bakes - I’m the only one that can give them that pleasure, so I’m not willing to give that up!”

If you’d like to cook like a Bake Off winner yourself, try this recipe from Nadiya’s Kitchen.

FETA AND DILL SAVOURY MUFFINS
(Makes 12)

  • 175g plain flour
  • 50g wholewheat flour
  • 2 1/2tsp baking powder
  • 1tsp fine salt
  • 275ml whole milk
  • 1 medium egg
  • 100g cottage cheese
  • 75g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
  • 50g feta cheese, crumbled
  • 1/2tsp wholegrain mustard
  • 2tbsp fresh dill, chopped
  • 1tsp ground black pepper
  • 8 sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
  • 25g pumpkin seeds

Preheat the oven to 200C/fan 180C. Line a 12-hole muffin tin with cases.
Put the flours, baking powder and salt in a bowl, and stir everything together.

Now add the milk, egg, cottage cheese, melted butter, feta cheese, mustard, dill and black pepper. Mix it all together and spoon into muffin cases.

Top each muffin with a little chopped sun-dried tomato and sprinkle with the pumpkin seeds.

Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes, or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.