PAUL HOLLYWOOD

Anything that has more buttercream than it does cake is going to be a no-no for me.

You can't beat a good doughnut. It has to be a jam one with light pastry and caster sugar on the outside. If I'm really tired, I have to hunt one down, because it gives me that sugar rush to keep me going.

Years ago, I saw a job for head baker for The Dorchester Hotel in London, and I didn't want to move away from the North West. But then I thought, 'I've got to do this for my career,' because I was very ambitious. So I went for it and got the job.

I want to pass on my secrets to people who are going to say, 'I have realised that I love baking, and now I'm going to make my bread and sell it at the local farmers' market,' or who might say, 'I am going to use the local Post Office in our village to sell my cakes.' I want to give them that little bit of fire.

The real Paul Hollywood is shy.

I will never, ever go on a carb-free diet.

I am fascinated by Tudor times.

Ironically, when I was in Dubai with the BBC 'Good Food Show,' even though it's an urban area, when you see the vast panorama from the top of the Burj Khalifa, it feels remote, as if it's just sprung up out of the desert. I like Dubai. I didn't think I would, but the food and the people were great.

Even I don't always come up to my own standards of perfection.

I do love my full English breakfast, but not every day. What I can't do without first thing in the morning, though, is my Danish pastry or a croissant - anything with a laminated dough, enriched with butter to make it beautifully golden and flaky.

The key thing is to educate not just kids but adults about what goes into food. You do that in any way you can, bread machine or not.

I have been a baker for more than 30 years now, and in terms of equipment, all I really need is flour. It still amazes me what a versatile commodity it is, as you can do so many different things with it, and I never tire of trying new blends and recipes.

We didn't travel much when I was little - most of what we did was visit various campsites around Conway, north Wales. My first major holiday abroad was to Ibiza with my parents when I was five. I vividly remember the plane touching down and that the hotel had great swings with lots of little lizards darting about that I was determined to catch.

I drove from Naples to the Amalfi coast in an Alpha Romeo 1969 Spider, which was lovely. There have been lots of movies made down there, and I felt a bit like James Bond - the driving is quite hairy. The locals have mopeds, but you wouldn't catch me on a bike on those roads. A tank would be safer!

New Year's resolutions generally don't work for me. Or I don't work for them. I make them, like everyone else, but I can't think of one I have stuck to for more than 24 hours.

'The Great British Bake Off' has brought baking to the nation, and we've seen people from all walks of life and backgrounds experience the highs and lows of competition and, more importantly, helping each other.

I don't believe in diets. They don't necessarily work. What they do is scrub your weight down, but as soon as you finish, you naturally go back up. I keep everything in my diet - gluten and sugar - I just cut it down a little bit and train more. It's not rocket science.

I have gone through some bad times with my own business. At one point, I was working my socks off, driving, delivering, baking. It was hard, hard work. But I worked through it. Running your own bakery is hard. I never came close to bankruptcy, but I had to cut back on staff.

I love Rome for their calzones and New York City for the variety of quality eateries, but I absolutely fell in love with Miami for the stone crabs at Joe's just off Ocean Drive - the best I've ever had, and the Cajun food. The steaks out there are colossal - it's like having a shark and a cow on your plate.

I sometimes worry that by encouraging so many more people to try their hand at baking through 'The Great British Bake Off,' I'm going to find myself in court one day charged with accelerating the national epidemic of obesity! To which I will plead not guilty. A slice of Victoria sandwich is never going to harm anyone.

To make a full-blooded puff pastry, you need time, you need patience, and you need precision. It's all about the lamination: it's all about building up the layers of butter, dough, butter, dough; as the butter melts, it creates steam, and that brings up the layers of the two doughs apart from each other, and that's what gives it the rise.

I may demonstrate the various stages of making a loaf on stage, but they don't end up in the final product I lift out of the oven at the end. If it were real food preparation, I'd wear a hair net, a hat, and rubber gloves - not a pretty sight.

Everyone has a favourite cake, pastry, pudding or pie from when they were kids.

Crumpets I make myself. I love crumpets. You can't beat a good home-made crumpet.

I was filming in Roscrea in Co Tipperary. I had great fun watching monks in the monastery there making bread. They even offered me a job as their main baker. One of them said I would make a good monk, but I told him there was a slight problem because I was married.