It has been the hardest year of my life
Bake Off 2016 winner Candice Brown talks to Katie Wright about the battle to keep her pub going and finding comfort in the kitchen
IT’S the end of a long, frustrating day, during which Candice Brown had to contend with train delays, a schlep across London on foot to reach her car, and a trafficclogged, two-hour drive to The Green Man – the pub she owns with her brother, Ben.
“I’m just watching one of the staff walking in and two girls are dancing,” Candice says , welling up with pride and relief as she surveys the happy scene in the Bedfordshire pub, a few weeks after lockdown restrictions eased.
“At one point last year, we didn’t have enough money to pay the staff. We had £416 in the bank, but we kept going and we’ve done it.”
trying to keep the siblings’ business afloat was just one of the challenges the Great British Bake Off winner, 36, faced.
“The first and second lockdowns, I was here in Eversholt on my own, which had a big impact on me. It’s a very small village and when it goes dark, it is pitch black and silent. I decided I needed some noise, something, otherwise I was going to lose my mind.”
After separating from Liam Macauley, her husband of two years, Candice moved in with friend Lauren Mahon, founder of the GIRLVSCANCER community, and now splits her time between their shared flat in Hackney and her lodgings above the pub.
Having previously spoken about her depression and PTSD after a massive asthma attack hospitalised her, last year the former PE teacher was diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; a condition that often goes undetected in women).
“It presents itself so differently in women and in girls,” says Candice, nicknamed Bumble because of her tendency to buzz about and flit between projects.
“It can be lack of attention, a hundred things happening in your brain, talking and losing your train of thought.”
Nearly a year-and-a-half into the pandemic Candice admits: “I’m mentally in quite a bad place, but learning to deal with it in different ways. I’m seeing a therapist, which is helping, but obviously I think he sometimes needs to go backwards to move forward.” She’s keen to point out that people with ‘invisible’ illnesses “can still achieve and succeed. It’s OK to go away and cry and go, ‘Oh my God, I am literally at breaking point’, but on the surface look OK.” At the same time, Candice says she sometimes struggles with self-compassion, while having enormous empathy for others. “When other people are talking, I would never say, ‘You should be ashamed of your mental health, of asking for help’. It’s ironic, because sometimes I still feel huge amounts of shame, which is probably why I’m so terrified about the book coming out.” That book is Happy Cooking, in which Candice writes candidly about her struggles and how she retreats to the kitchen in times of need (“I cook and I bake when I’m happy, sad, stressed, angry...”), and reveals the recipes that help her cope, whether it’s a comforting, gooey cheese and sausage toastie, a nourishing chicken tray bake, nostalgia-inducing angel cake, or Swedish cinnamon buns.
“As I say very openly in the acknowledgements, it’s been the hardest year of my life. I managed to put pen to paper and I’m so proud of that, and to be able to share something that’s been so difficult for me.”
With the book, she hopes to encourage others to discover their own ways of coping, whether food-related or not.
“We all know somebody – or we are that person – that maybe still struggles with mental health, and if cooking is your way of dealing with it, or reading or walking or running or exercise, then share those little things.
“My little, weird, sweary Happy Cooking book, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s just my way of doing things and if people go, ‘OK, I’m going to give that a go’, then
I cook and I bake when I’m happy, sad, stressed or angry
that will make me very, very happy.”
As for now? The courageous cook’s got a pub full of hungry punters and the Friday-night rush waiting. Having grown up with pub-owning parents, she was never under the illusion that being a landlady would be easy, but insists the “insane work” is also immensely rewarding.
“You see (the pub) busy, you get people saying they love what you’ve done and they’ve really enjoyed the food... that makes it all worth it,” Candice says, laughing as she thinks back to when she and her brother took on The Green Man in 2019.
“We knew it’d be hard work, but we never factored in a global pandemic, that’s for sure. You couldn’t write it, could you?”
■ Happy Cooking by Candice Brown, photography by
Ellis Parrinder, is published by Ebury Press, priced £22