Bake Off winner almost lost his chance to cook up victory
IT WAS a triumph that could net him millions of pounds – but Great British Bake Off winner Rahul Mandal was previously turned down as a contestant when he had applied for the hit television show.
Research scientist Mr Mandal, who secured victory in a tense final, only got as far as a telephone interview when he put himself up for the 2017 series.
One of his colleagues, David Anson said Mr Mandal had been on an “exponential learning curve” before appearing on the Channel 4 show and admitted one of his earliest bakes “wasn’t brilliant”.
He and Mr Mandal started new jobs at the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Rotherham on the same day just over three years ago.
“He was referring to the plants by their Latin names while chatting to the people who tended them,” the commercial programme manager said. “I thought ‘I don’t know the names of these plants in English and he’s referring to them by their Latin names’.
“He made me think: Goodness me, what sort of place have I come to?”
Mr Mandal, who beat Londonbased Ruby Bhogal and Kim-Joy Hewlett, from Leeds, to triumph in the final which was screened on Tuesday, did not bake when the pair first met, Mr Anson said. But in 2016 he brought into work one of his earliest creations – a Victoria sponge.
Mr Anson said: “He said it was his second ever cake that he’d iced. It was very over-the-top in colour and thickness. That wasn’t brilliant. I couldn’t eat the icing. It was 50-50 cake and icing.”
But Mr Mandal’s dedicated efforts to improve his baking skills are set to reap rewards – with industry experts predicting his win could lead to a multi-million pound windfall. Publicist and strategist Mark Borkowski said Mr Mandal’s victory was of the “zeitgeist”.
“With Brexit and Trump, and the news full of terrible stories, there is something about this winner that epitomises what people are craving – niceness, people to be kind, genuine and authentic,” he said.
“There’s no narcissism. His win just falls into that zeitgeist. That cliche used in reality shows, ‘you don’t know how good you really are’, that Simon Cowell line, Rahul is that person.”
He said Mr Mandal “will be hoovered up by many brands” and could go into anything from restaurants to food lines.
Figures released yesterday showed that more than seven million people tuned in to watch the baking competition’s final, with the audience peaking at 8.6m.