I’d love to be doing this for as long as Mary’s been doing it

Seven years after winning the Great British Bake Off, Nadiya Hussain has cemented her position as the most successful contestant of the show having written 16 cookery books and made numerous TV shows. Now with her own range of kitchenware, the 37-year-old talks to Gaby Soutar about her battle with anxiety and her hopes for longevity in an industry she stumbled into

Nadiya Hussain is wearing a black headscarf on our Zoom call. I’m slightly nervous, as I’d heard somewhere that she subconsciously wore that colour whenever she was in a bad mood.

“No, it’s green. Look,” says Hussain, tipping her head towards the camera so I can see the forest-y shade better. “The sun is shining. I feel happy and healthy. It’s Friday!”

Phew. It might not be orange – her jolliest hue – but green is pretty positive.

Not that her disposition should’ve worried me, as 37-year-old Hussain, who lives outside London with her husband, Abdal, and three children, Musa, 15, Dawud, 14 and Maryam, 11, is hardly known for being difficult.

Quite the contrary. She’s the cheery cherry on top of the bundt cake, and probably – no, definitely – the best known and most successful winner of the Great British Bake Off since it started way back in 2010.

In fact, apart from the occasional cookbook, column or cafe opening, where are all the others now?

Although we still might recognise Candice Brown, Ruby Tandoh, Kimjoy and John Whaite, from across the 12 seasons, Nadiya is the only bonafide household name. Giuseppe Dell’anno was the most recent winner, but we haven’t seen much of him yet.

“I think everybody’s been really successful in their own way,” says the diplomatic Hussain, who stays in touch with a few other contestants, including Tamal Ray, from her series of the show. “Not everyone’s looking for the limelight, everybody has their own path. I mean, I didn’t plan to do this – to come out and have a career. It was a serendipitous moment, a happy accident, that I managed to win.”

She took home the GBBO trophy in 2015, with a moving and tearful leaving speech to a record 15 million viewers, in which she said; “I’m never going to put boundaries on myself ever again. I’m never going to say I can’t do it, I’m never going to say maybe, I’m never going to say ‘I don’t think I can’. I can and I will.”

That was back when the programme was still on the BBC, being presented by Mel and Sue, and hadn’t yet migrated to Channel 4.

Since then, she has worked constantly.

I’m speaking to her in anticipation of the launch of a very smart ‘Nadiya Loves’ Cookware Range of professional-looking kitchenware with Prestige, but she has many other irons in the fire, so to speak.

Post GBBO, in 2016, there was the series The Chronicles of Nadiya, which saw her travelling to the north east of Bangladesh, where her parents are originally from. Since then, we’ve had Nadiya’s Family Favourites, Nadiya’s American Adventure, Nadiya’s Asian Odyssey, Nadiya Bakes and various other BBC television series.

The travelogue-style shows have occasionally taken her to Scotland, most memorably when she visited Wester Ross Fisheries in the village of Ullapool.

“It was serene, just beautiful,” she