Nadiya Bakes: A cheerful new-to-Neflix baking show

“Nadiya Bakes” is a new-to-Netflix show produced by BBC featuring Nadiya Hussain, a fan-favorite and winner of season six of the Great British Baking Show, in her home kitchen as she leads tutorials on her most coveted recipes. 

Each episode follows along the basic structure of Nadiya demonstrating two recipes, a snippet about her favorite bakers, followed by two more recipes. 

With each episode capped at 30 minutes, Nadiya moves quickly through the recipes. This made even her most intricate recipes feel like a five minute process and I was left wishing the fast-paced show would’ve let me truly take in the mouth-watering shots of her desserts.

The show is filled with bright colors from the desserts to her kitchen to her outfits. The bright plates and mugs lining her kitchen walls and her colorful head wraps made it easy to lose any stress or anxiety I felt from the problem sets piling up. At the same time, the vibrant colors never made me feel overwhelmed — unlike Jojo Siwa’s foyer. Nadiya’s recipes are also packed with even more colors from the spices she uses, like cardamon and saffron. She never misses an opportunity to add more flavor to her dishes. 

To connect with the viewers, she includes little tidbits about her life as she stirs in rice flour to the heavy cream or when she’s slicing cake for producers. I learned that her family growing up primarily cooked on the stove at their house when cooking, never using the oven — prompting them to instead to use the oven strictly as a food storage. 

The viewer also gets to know other bakers throughout Europe as they make pop-up appearances on the show. The baker shows off their signature dish and tells the story of how they came to be a baker. It was a nice change of pace to learn about ordinary bakers and see the face behind those Instagram-famous treats.

Between Nadiya’s decadent desserts to the scenes of the producers digging into cake, “Nadiya Bakes” provides a serotonin boost and an urge to put the chem aside and get to baking any day.