What Martha Did Next

Our favourite contestant from The Great British Bake Offis now ‘all grown up’ but will be back in Ascot for a traditional family Christmas

WHEN Martha Collison, then a student at Charters School in Ascot, took part in GBBO in the summer of 2014 you couldn’t help but notice the almost doting grandmotherly eye of Mary Berry as the show’s youngest ever contestant at just 17 battled her ways through the rounds.

Martha made it all the way to the Week 8 quarter-finals and the last five, picking up a couple of first places for the technical challenges along the way before the advanced dough test saw her leave. It was, she happily declared, the right time for her to go.

She’d somehow managed to keep her involvement a secret from school friends, but the Collison family were glad to have her back – and who wouldn’t want such a baking star in the kitchen at Christmas? Since then, Martha’s moved on, like GBBO, and the promise foreseen by Mary Berry has come to fruition.

She’s always been a wise head on young shoulders, evidenced by the three A levels she collected along the way – in Maths, Chemistry and Food Technology. “Originally I was planning to go to university to study Food Science, but I was already developing a career so had to make a decision,” she says. “I had this massive opportunity and eventually decided that coping with university exams at the same time was going to be a bit too much. So I decided to make a go of the other things first – you can always go back to university later.”