“In a strange way, I became close to a lot of them – without me realising, and without them realising, how much of a big role they were playing to support me emotionally.”
He remembers vividly a time when his parents left after visiting from India for two months. “I dropped them at the airport and after I came back, I felt very lonely – I couldn’t stay in the flat because suddenly, it was all empty again,” Mandal says.
In India, Mandal says: “I grew up with home-cooked food, we never really went to restaurants, because my mum is a great cook and my dad used to go and get fresh vegetables and fresh fish, but we never had an oven so baking was never really a thing. For me, bread meant you buy bread from shops, I never knew that you can actually make a loaf of bread. Obviously, we had chapatis and pooris – because you don’t need an oven.
Mandal arrived in the UK to go to Loughborough University in 2010. But when he joined the university’s Garden Society, “A lecturer came with [homemade] breads, biscuits and cookies and I was shocked to see you don’t have to buy bread – you can actually make bread at home!”.For Mandal, baking has become intertwined with happiness. “I like to surprise people by making cakes, say for a colleague’s birthday.
Paul Hollywood was terrifying in his own way too. “Oh my God, he never spoke to us. Even after [filming] he was very quiet. Prue [Leith] sometimes came to our benches to have a chit-chat after the challenges, but Paul always kept his distance. I was very, very intimidated by Paul.“Paul became really nice just after the final results were announced and then suddenly very friendly. I was so surprised to see him actually laughing and chatting with all the other people who came to the final.
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