She’s the schoolgirl who wowed the nation juggling exams with egg whites on The Great British Bake Off – and now she’s joining the Waitrose Weekend team. Martha Collison will be serving up her own stunning recipes for Waitrose, as well as sharing top tips from the kitchen and offering an insight into her life outside that famous tent. We caught up with her, and here's what she had to say:

You’re a former Waitrose partner…

I am yes. I’m very loyal to my Sunningdale branch! I used to work on a Saturday afternoon and a Wednesday evening, normally on the cheese counter – cheese and ham. I used to love it. I used to try all the different cheeses. I had a great time. They gave me a lot of time off during Bake Off, which was really nice of them, and then I went back briefly afterwards. But it was very different going back to a customer-facing role when everyone knows who you are. It was a bit more challenging. They moved me to the patisserie counter and every single customer who recognised me, without fail, would say ‘Did you make these cakes?’  Then I got busy with other things, and it was time to leave. But I’m still there every other day buying my ingredients, so they don’t miss me!

Let’s talk Bake Off. Were you nervous meeting the other contestants, being so much younger than the rest of them?

I was really nervous at the start because we didn’t find out who else was going to be on it until the night before filming the first episode. I met them all in the hotel lobby, and I looked around at all these people who were over 30, and I just didn’t know what I was going to talk to them about. I was nervous that they were all looking at me like I was some child. Nancy asked me straight out if I was 10, and then when anyone else came up to us, she’d say, ‘This is Martha, and she’s about 10.’ Because the gap was so big, I was a bit daunted about baking with people who’d been baking for years and years. But after a couple of weeks into it, I’d done some good bakes, I’d proved myself worthy to be there, and then I just relaxed and loved every minute of it.

You now call them your ‘baking family’…

Yes. Because we weren’t allowed to tell anyone we were doing the Bake Off while we were filming it, they were the only people I could talk to about it. And we became so close, because there are only 12 people in the world who shared that experience. It’s so intense, because you spend the whole weekend and the night before together, 16-hour days. You get really close, because they’re the only people you can trust. We still meet up. We had a lovely Christmas do in Covent Garden. Whenever we get together now, we’ve all done so many things that catching up is so much fun. Everyone wanted to buy me a drink, because every night we’d come back from the Bake Off and a lot of them would have a glass of wine or a beer to relax after a very stressful day, and I couldn’t have one because I was too young. So as soon as I turned 18 they were like, ‘Right, we’re all going to buy you a cocktail!’

We saw you getting a bit tearful in one show. Is it genuinely an emotional experience?

When you’re there on the location, it’s the only thing in the world that matters. They take away your phone and no one else knows where you are and you’re with these people in this tent, and it does feel like it’s the only thing in your world at that moment. And when everyone else does really well and you don’t do so well, something happens and… I never thought I’d be one of those people who cries. I thought, I’ll be really strong and I just won’t do it. But you just can’t help it – you’re just overcome with emotion because you’re so tired and you’ve worked so hard for that one thing. It’s a bit embarrassing, but you do cry. I think pretty much everyone cried at some point.

But you were very composed when you were actually voted off…

When I got voted off I was fine, because I was so amazed to have got to the quarter-final. I felt so lucky to have got that far – I thought I’d go out in week three or four. When I looked at the dates they sent us and two of them were over school days, I said to school, ‘I’ll be back for those, because it’s episode seven.’ And then I had to email them and say I actually wasn’t going to be able to come to school, because I was still in the show.

Your public response was generally positive, wasn’t it?

Yes, I was really lucky. Obviously you get some people who don’t like you, and sometimes you can’t help reading it because it just flashes up. But I didn’t seek it out – I didn’t read comments on news articles and stuff. Some stuff you’d see and wish you hadn’t read. But a lot of mine was really positive, and whenever I went out people would stop me and tell me I’d done really well. There aren’t many nicer things than people just stopping you and complimenting you in the street.

Was Bake Off a life-changing experience?

It has completely turned my life upside-down. I do things every day that 18-year-olds don’t do, and it’s just so exciting.

Do you cook as well as bake?

I do. I cook dinner for my family. We all like cooking, so we take it in turns. I started off doing cooking – I learned to cook at school and I entered some school competitions, and I just loved it. But I decided I preferred baking because it’s a bit more magical: I love how you can put something in the oven and it comes out looking completely different. And everyone loves baking – you can’t really take a roast chicken to someone else’s house, but you can take a Victoria sandwich.

Of all your baking triumphs, what would be your signature dish?

I love to just bake different things. I get quite bored if I have to bake the same things over and over again. But I always go to a good chocolate cake recipe, or nice hot cinnamon buns for breakfast – that’s my family’s favourite.

Who baked your 18th birthday cake?

It was just after my appearance on Extra Slice, so I used the cake they gave me. They gave me a cake as a leaving present, and I reused it on my 18th birthday – otherwise I would have been baking my own birthday cake, and that would have been quite sad!
 

How would you sum up the last 12 months?

I can’t even describe my last 12 months. It’s just been so unexpected, and so exciting. Every day I just wake up and I think, I can’t believe this is my life now! It’s everything I would have dreamed might happen when I’d been to university, established a career and worked my way up to this point. To be given all this at this age… I don’t know what my future holds, but I’m so lucky.