BRAINBOX JOINS
IT’S been more than a decade since she quit Countdown, her two children are grown up and she’s “single and dating” a number of men – some younger than her who she calls “special friends”.
No wonder Carol Vorderman, 59 has revealed she’s having the time of her life.
The telly brainbox is a qualified pilot and runs an online maths site, The Maths Factor, for children aged four to 11 who struggle with the subject.
She will be putting her engineering mind to the test next week as one of the celeb bakers for the final episode of The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up to Cancer on Channel 4, which sees model Kelly Brook, telly barrister Rob Rinder and comic Mo Gilligan joining her in the tent.
Carol is the favourite to win star baker and maybe get a Hollywood handshake – at school she was a prize-winning baking swot and she also baked a lot when her daughter Katie, now 29, was little.
“Once she left,” revealed Carol, “I didn’t really have any reason to bake. So all those hours – and anyone who has children understands this – when you’re doing the school run and packed lunches and pick up and all of that – now I get to do what I like doing.
“It’s the best time in my life. It’s bliss, I love it.”
A nun sparked Carol’s early love of baking. After her Dutch dad Tony left the family home three weeks after she was born, her mum Edwina took her and her two siblings from Bedford where they’d been living back to her home town of Prestatyn in Wales. Before going to Cambridge University to study engineering, Carol was educated at the Blessed Edward Jones Catholic High School.
She said: “My mum couldn’t cook, so it was Sister Barbara who taught me to bake. She was the cookery teacher at school. I went to a Catholic comprehensive in north Wales and got a grade A in cookery back in the 70s. I grew up in
Wales and we’d have the school Eisteddfod and I would win the baking year after year. I always enjoyed baking and now I’m at a stage in my life where I only do things I enjoy. Anything that I don’t like, I don’t do it. “I’ve kind of gone off cooking generally as I have had to do it for a family since I was 10 and I do other things I guess.” Carol has been married twice. Her second marriage to management consultant Patrick King, which ended in 2000, produced her children, Katie and son Cameron, 23. Bake Off became a thing she and
CAROL VORDERMAN IS IN A GOOD PLACE