Cleanliness may be close to godliness, but for Great British Bake-Off vet Lottie Bedlow, it doesn’t make your cookies any better. “Anyone who bakes and has a clean kitchen at the end of it, in my opinion, you don’t wanna trust these bakers,” she jokes to ABC Audio. “You want people who are throwing stuff around. You want the chaos, you want the drama. Those are the bakers are going to turn out really, really good cakes and cookies.”
That philosophy is also baked into Bedlow’s new book, Baking Imperfect: Crush, Whip and Spread It Like Nobody’s Watching, in which the self-described “trial and error” baker seeks to bring the fun back into the kitchen. “I want to make sure that people feel supported if they feel…maybe not as confident about because of all of these kinds of perfect things they see on Instagram,” Lottie expresses. “This book is…just about making sure that you feel supported and that you remember to laugh at yourself along the way.”
Lottie learned that lesson as a contestant on the hit reality program. “I think the show above all else taught me how to fail and laugh at myself when things go wrong, which they inevitably did,” she says.
Bedlow also shared tips for getting rid of that leftover trick-or-treat booty, noting, “The easiest, easiest thing to do…would be fudge. So you take your condensed milk and your semi-sweet chocolate, melt it together in the microwave, and then you throw in anything else that you have lying around. So that can be Skittles, it could be Oreos, it could be M&Ms. Whatever you want, you throw it all in…a lined tin…and in 3 hours…you’ve got perfect fudge with your favorite candy inside.” (AUDIO IS ABC 1-ON-1)