Food & Farming page met Selasi Gbormittah and learned from the former Bake Off why this isn’t his first visit to the island and why Paul Hollywood is a lot nicer that he appears on TV.

It turns out Selasi, who was the special guest at this year’s Food & Drink Festival, is a biker as well as a baker. He’s been several times to the TT and says his favourite place to watch is on the mountain section of the course.

His lifelong love of food stems from his childhood in Ghana where convenience foods were unheard of. He recalls: ’I used to go to the market with my parents and everything was fresh. You’d pick up your tomatoes and you’d pick up your chicken, which you’d probably get killed for you: everything was really fresh. I didn’t know about this whole food in packaging that is in supermarkets.’

This requirement to cook everything from scratch, he adds, instilled in him the need to be able to fend for himself when it came to food: ’I’ve always had this mentality where, if no one’s around to feed you, you’ve got to do it yourself. I’ve grown up cooking with my parents, my grandma, aunties, uncles so I’ve always been active in the kitchen and always wanted to be a chef when I was growing up.’

It wasn’t until he went to Nottingham Trent University that he was introduced to baking.

’I knew nothing about baking - there were birthdays and there were cakes but it never really interested me. Then I got introduced to it at uni. That was the highlight for me: I picked it up and really loved it. Then because I’m heavily involved with charity work I used to do a lot of bake sales to raise money and then my friends and my colleagues used to tell me: "why don’t you go on the Bake Off"?’

Selasi was renowned for appearing very laid back in the tent of dreams and, although he says he wasn’t that calm inside, he soon worked out how he could best cope with being on the show: ’In Bake Off there are pressures and there are things that you can’t necessarily control.

’The temperatures in the tent were not the best; the equipment was OK but sometimes, if you needed something to chill really fast, it wasn’t the best and that’s the mentality I went for: you just work with things you can control and then leave it to fate and see how it goes.’

He goes on: ’It’s something I enjoy doing so I didn’t see it as a competition - I would just go in and have some fun.’

And he adds that, despite Paul Hollywood being shown on TV making some harsh comments about competitors’ bakes, that wasn’t the whole story. Selasi says Paul would often take people aside afterwards and suggest things they might try to improve their bakes for next time.

He says: ’I keep telling everyone: there’s not many people who can say they’ve had the experience of having their bakes judged professionally by the likes of Paul and Mary. For me that experience, whether I won or lost, is priceless and I took on a lot of the feedback from the judges and I’ve applied it since leaving the tent.’

Selasi has also continued to develop his baking skills: ’I went to the Culinary Arts Academy in Lucerne and I kind of learned how to bake properly. Since then I’ve done a few pop-ups and a lot of brand partnerships and I basically just bake for fun and for a living now: it’s great.’