AS another batch of kitchen whizzes whipped the nation into a frenzy this week on The Great British Bake Off, Taste meets Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry to chew the fat.

“No one chastises themselves more than the contestants, and that’s been the case this year,” says 50-year-old Hollywood.

“They get really down about it. Nadiya (Hussain, last year’s winner) recently said she got upset about one of her bakes, and I’d whispered to her, ‘It’s only a baking show, it doesn’t matter’.

“I’ve done that this year as well. The big, horrible person that I am, what you don’t see is I’ll go and have a word with them quietly.”

But with over 14 million viewers tuning in to see Hussain crowned winner of the BBC One series, a reported 19 per cent increase in the number of people baking (according to Waitrose), and cooking essentials flying off the shelves as each episode’s credits roll, evidently the Bake Off is more than just your average TV competition.

Now back for a seventh series, both judges feel this year’s batch of contestants are more nervous than ever.

“They were slower to settle down this time, because all the people that enter have watched the previous years,” explains 81-year-old Berry.

And if it doesn't look like the contestants are feeling the pressure, her co-judge is only too happy to help.

"About three or four programmes in, I played the theme music for Bake Off on my phone," he says with a chuckle.

"So as they walk in the tent, I play it and it freaks them out. It suddenly dawns on them where they actually are!"

There are no shortcuts to curry favour though.

“The contestants always look at what recipes both of us have done, because they think it will favour them in the judging,” says Berry resolutely.

“But it doesn’t.”

Much is made of the almost mother-son relationship between the Bath-born grandmother and the father-of-one, helped in no small part by the latter’s admission that Berry has been known to iron his shirts during the series.

N The Great British Bake Off continues on BBC One at 8pm this Wednesday