CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Nadiya’s motto is – bake, eat and be happy

Nadiya Bakes

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Simple Comforts

Rating:

Let out your belt a couple of notches and hide the bathroom scales. Auntie just served up a double portion of cookery shows so rich in cholesterol, you could spread them on crackers.

Nadiya Hussain has never been famous for her salads but the Bake Off champion now seems to be intent on inventing the most fattening dishes conceivable.

King George IV, who used to breakfast on steak pie, brandy and two pigeons, would have baulked at her scone pizza on Nadiya Bakes (BBC2). The size of a bicycle wheel, this monster scone was cut into triangular slices and topped with a deep quilt of blueberry jam stirred into clotted cream.

Cream teas are an indulgence, and pizzas are weapons of mass obesity. Combining the two is like ordering an Uber and typing in: ‘Destination: coronary.’

But Nadiya was just getting started. Her main course was toad-in-the-hole with a Bangladeshi twist — spicy lamb kebab balls floating in an ocean of batter.

And that was a slimming aid, compared with her clotted cream cupcakes. Baked on a shortbread base, they were frosted in ice cream and dipped in freeze-dried strawberries.

Nadiya kept telling us that baking was her antidote to anxiety. She’s clearly not anxious about blocked arteries. ‘Let’s bake, eat and be happy,’ she said, and didn’t need to add, ‘for tomorrow we diet.’

Still, you can’t get fat by watching her cook, and her enthusiasm lifts everybody’s spirits.

In a candy pink top and blue dungarees, she looks like a sweet-maker from a fairy story, and her wonderfully expressive face is either beaming with joy or frowning with horrified alarm.

She was almost giggling with glee as she poured mango sauce over her fruity Victoria sponge. Then she gathered a handful of coconut flakes and her face clouded with exaggerated distress.

We must never, she warned us urgently, sprinkle coconut flakes without toasting them first. Untoasted flakes taste (and her voice dropped, as though she was about to say a Bad Thing) like sawdust shavings from the bottom of a rabbit hutch.

The shadow lifted. Dreadful thoughts of pet bedding were banished. ‘Baking is my happy place,’ she trilled.

Her mentor Mary Berry’s happy place is easier to find on a map. For the first episode of her show Simple Comforts (BBC2), Mary travelled to Paris, where she studied at Le Cordon Bleu.

She was in the French capital to recreate the first dish she ever cooked at the famous school, croque monsieur — or, as she called it in English, Mr Crunchy.

Though she makes a sparrow look overweight, Mary is no stranger to a calorie herself. She trowelled gruyere onto those fancy ham toasties like a bricklayer with a bucket of mortar.

Then she visited an underground Paris bakery to try her hand at croissants. Apparently, the recipe is four-fifths butter. Nadiya would approve.

Like her student, Mary seems to glow with affection as she cooks. ‘This is the food that makes you feel that everything will be all right,’ she chirruped, as she glazed a buttery apple frangipane tart in apricot jam.

But in case her frangipane doesn’t put the world to rights, she has a back-up plan — a boozy lunch in a Paris bistro with its owner, Benoit.

In France, lunch breaks typically last at least an hour, even for schoolchildren. There is no legal maximum, but Benoit recommends no more than eight glasses of wine.

Mary raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s ok,’ Benoit assured her with a wink, ‘this wine is 80 per cent water.’