“It was genuinely magical right from the start,” Mike says of his GBBO (Great British Bake Off) experience over a cup of tea and a slice of his amazingly good Victoria sponge.
“The first time I went into the tent was just completely surreal. I felt like Dorothy arriving in Oz because it’s just this magical wonderland of a place.”
A fourth-generation farmer who farms in partnership with his mum, dad and sister in Wiltshire, Mike has been baking for as long as he can remember.
“My mum used to bake with us when we were little. We always had a tradition in our house to make birthday cakes – it would never have even crossed my mind that a birthday cake wouldn’t be homemade. That’s just how it was.
“We used to get really excited about helping Mum bake and I always remember my nan baking loads of desserts and puddings for family gatherings.
“She’d have her big white plastic mixing bowls out and that feeling of just being in the kitchen and baking, it’s nostalgic for me.”
Food brings people together
In addition to his role as farm manager for CP Farming in Malmesbury, Mike says he has always had a passion for cooking, and baking in particular.
“I’ve always loved it and what it brings and enables. It’s always been a comfort to me and just the process of baking, I find really relaxing. I’m not very good at de-stressing in the sense that if I’m not doing something, I quite often feel even more stressed, so I really like doing things that feel proactive but are not necessarily productive. Things like baking or gardening, that kind of thing.
“Food brings families and people together and you can have conversations around a table while you’re eating in a way that you just don’t any other time.”
NFU member Mike Wilkins
“Although Bake Off was not exactly relaxing! It’s the most taxing thing I’ve ever done. I need to get it back in my head that not everything I bake has to be perfect because I’m not a spectacular, amazing patissier or baker. I’m just a very ordinary at-home passionate baker.
“I have as many failures as I do successes but now it kind of feels like there’s a pressure that if I’m making a birthday cake for a friend or taking something somewhere, it’s got to look that little bit extra special. But actually, for me, that’s not the point of baking.
“The point of baking is to throw something together. It’s just wholesome, tasty stuff that you can throw in an old biscuit tin which you can get out when friends come over for tea or coffee.
“When you’re making food for somebody, no matter what it might be, it’s with love, isn’t it? My fellow contestant Illiyin said on Bake Off that food is her love language and that just sums it up so perfectly. I just love baking and cooking.
“The thing that brings me more joy than anything else in the world is having a massive Sunday roast. Every time I go with my fiancé Matt to see his family, I’ll cook a roast in his mum’s kitchen and that just makes me so happy.
“Just everyone sitting around the table and enjoying an amazing meal. It’s such a point of togetherness and is a moment when everyone can just sit down.
“Food brings families and people together and you can have conversations around a table while you’re eating in a way that you just don’t any other time. I just think it’s very special.”
Sourcing local
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Another thing Mike feels is very special, is the importance of using British ingredients in all, or as much as possible, of his bakes and cooking.
“I felt a huge pressure and privilege to be the first farmer to ever go on Bake Off. It’s absurd to me that there never has been one before. It’s shocking the amount of people that don’t put baking and farming together.
“At the very core of baking is what we, as farmers, produce – flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. All of those raw ingredients come directly off of farms. They’re all very short processing lines from leaving a farm to being in a kitchen.
“There’s such a disconnect with food nowadays that there’s not that many examples of things that people can really trace back the origins of local or British food. The components of baking are a great example of this but people don’t really think about it.
“Any farmhouse kitchen anywhere in the country will have that biscuit tin with half a cake in or some biscuits or something. Baking and farming are so intrinsically linked, culturally and societally and it is because we produce these ingredients.
“It is so important to educate people that this is where their food comes from and to help them join the dots, especially as an increasing number of people are becoming more interested in eating sustainably. We need to tell the stories of these local supply chains and explain why sourcing food locally is so important.
"The best way to eat sustainably is to eat locally and seasonally.
“To have had the opportunity to attempt to showcase that as a farmer on Bake Off was amazing; it was really special. It was the whole foundation of my entire application. I wanted everything I used in the tent to be not only British, but local because it’s not spoken about enough.”
Breed preservation
Mike hopes to continue educating the public about the importance of sourcing locally in the coming years, with plans to develop a farm shop and café.
“It’s always been a dream of mine and my sister Chloe’s. For around the past 15 years or so, this is what we have wanted to do.
“We’ve always been predominantly arable but at the beginning of Covid my sister brought livestock back to the farm and now we have quite the menagerie of rare breeds.”
This includes Oxford black pigs – which is a full-circle moment for Mike whose nan used to rear pigs on her farm – British white cattle, Herefords, Wiltshire horn sheep, and Exlana sheep.
“We all, but Chloe especially, feel very passionately about breed preservation and working with rare and native breeds is another way to really tell the story of food and where it comes from.
“We already have a Click & Collect online farm shop from which we sell all of the meat at the moment but we want to build on that to bring our passion for local sustainable produce really to life because we have a huge volume coming direct from the farm.”
Wedding cake and farm flowers
Wider plans include working with other local farmers to offer milk and veg in the shop and even to grind their own flour on farm.
“We’ve got a network of people in the area we’d love to work with. We’ve already proved it works logistically so now we just need to take the step to make it work financially,” Mike says.
But first, is the small matter of getting married. With the date set, Mike is preparing to bake his own wedding cake and desserts and to grow his own flowers on farm.
“I felt a huge pressure and privilege to be the first farmer to ever go on Bake Off.”
NFU member Mike Wilkins
“The current plan for the cake is four tiers. Starting at the base with a traditional fruit cake, then the chocolate cake that I did for Bake Off, followed by a coffee cake and on top will be a gluten-free lemon cake, which will be based on the recipe that I made for Bake Off.”
The plan is to then decorate the masterpiece with fresh tulip petals. “I’ve got about 6,500 tulip bulbs that I planted over Christmas to create a meadow for the wedding,” Mike says. “That will, hopefully, keep going for years to come and give us plenty of flowers to cut as we’re planning to have pots and pots of tulips and mortar troughs.
"We went to a farm sale recently and bought 27 water troughs! Mom was pleased as they’ll go out to the livestock fields post-wedding.”
Food for the soul
As the bulbs work their magic under the soil, Mike says that during the winter months – which can be so tough for many – he likes to garden where able, but cooking and baking are, unsurprisingly, the main things which bring him joy.
“When I get home late, or when it’s dark out, I quite often struggle to switch off. I can’t lie down as my brain is still going 100mph after a day’s work which makes me feel anxious and stressed.”
To help deal with this, Mike will go into the kitchen or try to find something to do that is methodical.
“I find this helps me to unravel everything that’s going on in my head. Listening to a podcast or an audiobook helps me go to bed feeling calmer, as does reaching out to my friends and family or colleagues.
“It can be tough sometimes. Going through a period like this autumn or the year before when everything’s going wrong and it just keeps raining, it’s hard. You can’t do anything, and you’re just walking the fields every day just watching the crops die. It’s really, really not good for your sanity and for your mental health. Having people be at the end of the phone or even better if you can, to see in person is just so helpful to take you out of that environment and headspace.
“Sometimes, all you need to give you a boost is to just invite someone over, or go to them, have a chat and have something good to eat. That’s something that I just find very therapeutic.”
