‘I practise baking when the kids are asleep ... until 3am’

the ice cream desserts her father’s restaurant served.

‘We don’t really have desserts in our culture,’ she explains. ‘If there are sweet things, they are eaten as a snack beforehand.’ Curiosity boosted her interest in baking at school, and she began bringing home traditional British puddings.

Her struggling parents didn’t own an oven until Nadiya was a teenager, so her cakes made at school were gratefully received.

‘ I love making British classics, things Mrs Marshall taught me,’ she says. ‘Once I started to make desserts, crumbles and pies, it caught on. Now my family always expect one.’

Nadiya’s father, who she affectionately calls ‘Baba’, is a talented cook and her online profiles are full of photographs of him creating dishes from ingredients such as eel and jackfruit seeds.

‘Dad is such an amazing cook,’ she has said. ‘Only he can make eel appetising.’

Her mother doesn’t speak much English, but she, too, is a skilled chef, teaching her daughter to make Bangladeshi pastries.

After she left college at 18, friends introduced Nadiya to Abdal Hussain, a computer sciences graduate from Coventry University. Two years later, in August 2005, the pair married and moved in with Abdal’s parents, Abdul and Shofiqun, in Leeds, before finally moving into a home of their own in 2008.

Abdal, now 34 and a technical manager for a computer company, is clearly his wife’s biggest fan.

‘I am the proudest husband on the planet tonight,’ he wrote online when she won Star Baker last month.