Celebrity cake maker and influencer Sandro Farmhouse, or Sandro as he is known to his fans, first won the nation’s hearts when he took part in the 2022 Great British Bake Off, and became an instant culinary pin-up. A former nanny and community worker for children with autism and special needs, he raised the heat in the tent with his bench-press physique, affable banter and huge smile.

As a finalist, he lost the Bake Off crown to Syabira Yusoff, but being on the show brought him the social media profile and financial security he had worked so hard to pull off. The fact that he was rejected the first time he applied to Bake Off, dug deep and re-applied is a mark of the tenacity and determination at work behind his model good looks and feelgood social media posts.

Not all his Instagram feeds are about his glitzy lifestyle, however. One of them is Baking on the Spectrum, or BOTS, a baking course for people on the autism spectrum and their families. Sandro grew up in Newham, east London, where he still lives today. After leaving school at 16, he worked as a shop assistant for River Island before doing voluntary work with children who had special needs.

Cut to 2020, and the pandemic, and Sandro found himself the one who was struggling. “I didn’t suffer any loss in the pandemic, but it was tough.” A stranger to anxiety until this point, he found himself thinking, “Will I make it to tomorrow?” he tells me on Zoom from Istanbul, where he is on holiday. “It was scary.” His solution? To set up an online baking group as a form of therapy and a way to connect. A little later he crowdfunded and secured support from Social Ark, the charity for children with special needs in east London for whom he had previously worked, and BOTS was born.

One of the most enthusiastic bakers to sign up was an autistic girl, now aged 20, who joined with her sister. Largely non-verbal, she enjoyed working with her hands, and Sandro saw how therapeutic it was for her. “She had other difficulties, too, and it made me think about what was going on for people like her during the pandemic – people who really lack support in normal times.”

‘I won’t take no for an answer. I’ll go for what I want’: on Bake Off series six. Photograph: Mark Bourdillon/Channel 4 / Love Productions

The BOTS sessions take place online so that participants, who typically struggle with change and being in unfamiliar environments, can be at home. “Why add another challenge?” says Sandro, who believes parents, as well as teachers, need to be educated about how autism is experienced. “We have to help them, train them, educate them in ways that help them better bond with their [autistic] children. Some parents just don’t get that support.”

The sensory activity of baking with your hands speaks to the individual’s needs, he says, developing motor and communication skills. Sandro has just secured new funding from the Foundation for Future London and, next month, BOTS will be rolling out a new programme for up to 500 families.

“I’m super excited,” says Sandro, who is an ambassador for the National Autistic Society. “But I don’t take applicants who don’t love baking. What’s the point? I want you to be doing something you love doing. Hopefully, that leads to something. To an independent life. To achieving something.”

Sandro, 31, was brought up by his mother, Sandra, who grew up in Angola, fleeing the Angolan war when her son was two. He never knew his father, who died when he was 21. His mother re-married and had three more children, though his stepfather wasn’t around much. His mother is his rock. “No matter where I am in life, she’s always there,” he says. “I am so inspired by her journey; she did it all on her own.” Kicked out of home for becoming pregnant at 17, she came to England at 21, unable to speak English. She took domestic jobs, then became a teaching assistant. She is currently setting up a business with Sandro that will provide homemade, nourishing soups for the homeless.

Youth centres were a big part of his childhood, providing a “safe” space and sense of belonging denied him at school. He bemoans the lack of similar community provision today. “Maybe if we had more of these spaces today, there’d be less crime, and people would want to do well.”

For his part, Sandro is doing more than well now: he’s been resident baker on ITV’s Lorraine, commissioned by Google to make a five-tiered showstopper cake commemorating its top UK search trends (the pink layer is dedicated to Olivia Newton-John) and models for River Island.

He’s laid the groundwork to get this far. In 2017, for instance, he made Stormzy an all-black cake for his birthday, which then went viral, he’s gifted cakes to members of Little Mix, and posts cake tributes to Beyoncé in the hope that he’ll one day get to bake for her. Ambitious and savvy, he plans to start a new project on Instagram, any day now, he says, one that will be “a change for my following” (he has 186,000). While he’s keeping this new venture close to his chest, everything suggests he will be shifting the spotlight to his community work and ambition to help young people manage stress.

“I wasn’t set for success,” he says. “In my environment and in my school, I was set to fail. It was expected for me not to do well in life, or at school. I believed it for a while.”

It was expected I wouldn’t do well in life. I believed it for a while

Last year, Sandro posted a letter to his younger self on Instagram. He wrote of how he will lose his dad and will feel “a part of you is lost”. He continued: “No matter what you may hear about yourself or others’ views, you will always be great, you have everything you need to shine one day and you will. So place both hands on your ears to ignore the noise, stick your tongue out at the meanies and get on with it.”

“There’s always been noise, throughout my life,” he explains. “There’s always noise. The noise hasn’t stopped. The noise has actually got louder since my success. “The noise is people’s opinions, how people view me, how people speak of me, the words people say, whether it’s you can’t do this. I don’t listen to that.

“Growing up, before I could even learn about who I am, other people were telling me who I am, who I shouldn’t be. I don’t go into my sexuality. I don’t think it’s for me to say, hey, I’m gay, but that was a part of the noise. Before I could even acknowledge it, everyone else was telling me that, and it’s a shame that I am a child at school and I can’t go and play with the girls. But I’m not interested in football, it’s just that simple.” He laughs. “I’m interested in jumping on the trampoline – , because that looks fun. All these things,” he sighs, “all these things, these stereotypes.

“I did get bullied quite a bit. I always was the outsider.” Today, he sees the upsides. “I’m actually happy being a loner, I love my own company. I’m a pretty thick-skinned individual who won’t take no for an answer and will go for what he wants – so the world has to watch out for me!” He laughs deeply, but you know he means it.

Sandro loved dancing as a child, which gave him confidence. He liked breakdancing, but was forced to do ballet (“a no-no, for sure”). If only contemporary dance, with its understanding of the form as a means of self-expression and communication, had been on offer. When he was 17, he was told by an adult he chooses not to identify that he wasn’t allowed to dance any more, that it was “influencing [his] sexuality”.

He has said more than once that being on Strictly Come Dancing is in his sights. Being on Strictly would be “more than just going on a show”, he says. “It would be three things: a ha-ha to those bullies; it would tell that young child who I used to be that I was OK; and it would stop the noise.”

Try this: helping a young person to improve his skills in the kitchen

He’s loyal to Bake Off, though, is close friends with fellow contestants Rebs Lightbody, Maxy Maligisa and Maisam Algirgeet, and loves Prue Leith. “She’s like my auntie.” When they were waiting for the cameras to roll, he’d adjust her clothing or fix her hair. “We had a special bond, Prue and I. I sense that she wanted me to go far.”

Right now, he is focusing on getting some kind of equilibrium in his new, post-Bake Off life, switching off his phone for two hours each morning and evening, meditating and praying first thing. One of his many tattoos, on his neck, depicts a cross with a peace sign and a heart. “It really is who I am,” he says. “I’m a believer in Christ. I don’t believe I can do all this without him, so that comes first for me.” Taking time to reflect is making him feel more anchored. “I am seeing things more clearly, seeing that money is great, but that we have to be accountable to this world and this planet and the people in it. I want to be part of changing the world. I want to be remembered for those things, not for what I look like, or for the surface stuff.”

As we talk, his ambitions, which include opening an orphanage one day in the future, can sound grandiose, even hard to swallow, for a performative, celebrity-wooing influencer with full-on, much-shared skincare and fitness regimes. But the truth of it is that Sandro, who describes himself as an “open book”, is checking in with his own values. He is already walking the talk with BOTS, and wants to commit to more community activism.

“I want to give back,” he says, and intends to do so close to home, in Newham, where he is planning to buy his own home. Working with young males to reach their potential is top of his wish list. “I’d like to find a way to speak to people like myself, from Newham, whether you’re a young black boy, a young white boy, whoever you are: it’s not about race for me – it’s about doing well.” Sandro is mindful that the “environment” he grew up in continues to present significant challenges to young people today; Newham has some of the most deprived communities in the UK, crime rates are high and qualification levels are low. Sandro’s key message is to believe in yourself, and to do that, he says, “You have to ignore the noise: you have to focus.”

For his own part, he doesn’t want his own heightened sensitivity to “take its toll”. But, he says, “I also don’t want to remove those feelings, because that’s what drives me, too. I’ve been thinking about a way to let this sensitivity out,” he says, “I want to show people that it’s OK to care.”

For more information, go to bakingonthespectrum.com