The chef reclaiming the beauty of beige food

Benjamina Ebuehi wants to reclaim the beauty of beige food.

While it doesn’t always have the best reputation for being particularly nutritious or tasty, Ebuehi still loves it – and has dedicated a whole chapter in her new cookbook to the “Best of beige”.

“You don’t need to add colour. It’s honestly a beautiful colour in its own right,” she says passionately.

Perhaps it’s also partly because Ebuehi, 29, wrote her latest cookbook, A Good Day To Bake, in lockdown. This means she was craving “comfort food” more than normal, and it’s these wholesome, comforting and – yes – beige bakes that permeate the book.

Fans of The Great British Bake Off will remember Ebuehi as a talented baker who made it to the quarter-finals in 2016, known for her bold flavours and wide smile. She’s still very much got the same sunny disposition, and laughs frequently – even though the water in her house had unexpectedly been shut off the day we speak. “Everyone’s at home – but yeah, turn the water off, great,” she says, giggling.

In the new book, Ebuehi doesn’t just want to change people’s minds about beige food though. She also wants to convince wannabe bakers to try new and interesting flavour combinations, and ingredients they might not have thought about before. “If people are comfortable with carrot cake, then I don’t think parsnip is that far away,” she reasons.

“We shouldn’t feel like we have to limit ourselves to particular ingredients, or particular recipes. Especially within savoury cooking, there is so much variety and so many combinations – and a lot of them can work really, really well within baking. So it’s about opening that creative side, and giving it a go.”

Unexpected ingredients pop up throughout Ebuehi’s sweet bakes – from sage doughnuts to fennel and peach cobbler. She admits a lot of her inspirations come from savoury recipes – particularly when eating out.

“I’ve always had a palate for things that are just a little bit different,” she adds. “I do love the classics, the things you don’t really want to touch and tamper with. But I think they’re so much more interesting when you can add something a little unexpected – and when you give something to someone to try, and they’re not expecting a particular flavour, but it works. I’ve always enjoyed giving people something a little bit unexpected.”

Although not a sweet dish, the plantain and fennel quiche is certainly a surprising combination – and it’s particularly close to Ebuehi’s heart, growing up in a Nigerian family in London. “I love that one, because plantain is such a staple in our household,” she says. “We eat it all the time, so to be able to include it in the book was really special. And in a quiche – I mean, my parents, my family have never had it in a quiche, so it was really fun to play around with that. And they really liked it, my cousins loved it.

“Showcasing ingredients we’ve grown up with, but in a different way, has been really cool.”

Ebuehi’s often asked where she learned to bake, but she admits it wasn’t from her family. While she says her mother is “really, really good” at cooking, “she would not bake at all”. Instead, Ebuehi’s love of baking was organic, and her own adventure.

“I started quite young, maybe nine or 10,” she says. “But it was very much fairy cakes, basic biscuits – that sort of thing.” When her mum got her a kids’ cookbook, she started working her way through that: “And I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Ebuehi got serious about baking when she went to the University of Leicester, studying economics – and then she got the call-up for BakeOff in 2016.

A lot has changed in the six years since she appeared on the show, and she’s now onto her second cookbook. “I’m definitely more confident in the flavours I like, the way I style my food – keeping it really simple and pared back. I’m more assured of my style and my voice in my recipes than I was back then,” she reflects. “Back then, I was very young and had lots of ideas, but didn’t really know how to execute them. I’m definitely more confident in the way I speak now.”

One thing that hasn’t changed? Ebuehi’s penchant for carrot cake. She calls it her “first love”, explaining it was “one of the first cakes I made that I really, really, really loved and tweaked and made my own recipe for – so that’s still one I make quite often today”.

‘A Good Day To Bake: Simple Baking Recipes For Every Mood’ by Benjamina Ebuehi (published by Quadrille on 17 March, £22; photography by Laura Edwards).