What has Nigella Lawson said about Bake Off? Star tipped for show

Bake Off judge Prue Leith is taking a bit of a step back from the show, and Nigella Lawson is tipped to take over.

Leith – who has been a judge on the Channel 4 series since 2017 – will still be on the main programme as usual alongside Paul Hollywood, and will remain on The Great American Baking Show. But the 84-year-old will skip the celebrity version.

"It's mainly because these things are filmed back to back the whole way through the summer," she explained on This Morning. "So you start in April and you end at the end of August and honestly, you get no time off, and so I'm getting a bit old and there are places I want to go to. And other things I want to do."

Talk has now turned to who might fill in, with Lawson emerging as the hot favourite. So would she do it? We have a look at everything the star has said about Bake Off in the past.

Nigella Lawson does watch Bake Off

Lawson has previously revealed that she does tune in to see the goings on in the famous tent.

Back in 2013 she shared a photo on Twitter (which is now X) of a delicious looking cake on a plate, and told fans: "Yum: settling down to The Great British Bake Off with a slice of this blackcurrant Victoria sponge."

Star said Bake Off was 'complicated'

Despite her cooking prowess, Lawson once said she didn't think she would fare too well if she was one of the contestants on Bake Off herself.

"I wouldn’t get on Bake Off, it’s too complicated," she told Radio Times in 2015. "I like baking in a homespun kind of way – if I make cookies, I don’t expect them all to look the same. I’m not being modest."

"I don’t have the qualifications to say to people, 'You can’t eat that, you can’t eat this'," she said. "I’m not in a position to preach anything to anyone else."

Nigella Lawson says her biscuits are never identical

Lawson mentioned Bake Off again a couple of years later, referring to the fact that when the bakers are tasked with making cakes or biscuits, they are all supposed to be uniform.

"We live in a world where there is so much, so glossily done," she told Good Housekeeping in 2017. "If I am given a cake, I like to see that it has been made by someone and that it’s not even. That is what cooking is. Things can’t look like they come from a factory.

"You know on Bake Off where they say you have to make 18 biscuits and they have to be identical? I have never had two biscuits that look identical!"

Judging experience

Lawson does have experienced of judging other people's dishes on shows like MasterChef US and The Taste and in 2022 she landed a judging slot on Australian cooking show My Kitchen Rules.

And it seems the fun and warmth of Bake Off could be just right for Lawson, as she has previously revealed she isn't a fan of "mean" cooking shows.

“I don’t like that at all," Australia's Now To Love quoted her as saying. "I think it’s counterproductive for everyone. It makes people at home feel inhibited about cooking too, because they have this persecutory voice in their heads. I couldn’t be part of a programme like that. It doesn’t mean to say you’re not honest, but there’s never a need to be mean.”

Yahoo has contacted Channel 4 and a representative for Lawson for comment.

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Watch: 'She will not appear on the celebrity version': Prue Leith is set to take a break from 'The Great British Bake Off'