The Great British Bake Off Series 16: Recap, Bakes and Winner

Spoiler note: this recap names the winner of Great British Bake Off series 16.

Series 16 of The Great British Bake Off aired from September 2 to November 4, 2025, the most recent full series covered on this site, with twelve bakers competing across ten episodes. The full show record lives on our Great British Bake Off hub.

How the format worked in series 16

Series 16 ran on the same three-bake structure the show has used since 2010: a Signature bake for personal style, a Technical challenge where every contestant bakes from an identical, stripped-down recipe and is ranked blind by the judges, and a Showstopper that closes the episode as the week's most ambitious bake. Star Baker, awarded weekly to the strongest performer, is the title Jasmine Mitchell collected five separate times on her way to the final, tying the show's record for most Star Bakers by a single contestant.

The final and the winner

Jasmine Mitchell, a 23-year-old medical student from Edinburgh, won series 16, beating Tom Arden and Aaron Mountford-Myles in the final.

Mitchell, the only Scottish-born baker in the series 16 lineup, moved to London to study medicine and had to balance filming with hospital placements throughout the run. She earned Star Baker five times over the course of the series, a record matched by only one other contestant in the show's history, before going on to win the whole competition. She has also spoken publicly about living with alopecia since age 12 and her decision not to wear a wig, using her platform after the show to talk about it.

The full series 16 lineup

Hometowns and the shape of the cast

Three of the twelve bakers, Tom Arden, Jessika Trassel, and winner Jasmine Mitchell, were based in London by the time filming began, with the rest of the cast drawn from Northern Ireland, Merseyside, and the Midlands. Mitchell was the only Scottish-born baker in the lineup, having relocated from Edinburgh to London to study medicine.

Judges, hosts, and a few standout details

Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith judged, with Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond hosting. Shortly after this series aired, Prue Leith announced she was stepping down from the judging panel, with Nigella Lawson named as her successor for the next series, a genuinely significant changeover after Leith had judged every series since the Channel 4 move in 2017. The cast's age range ran from Jasmine Mitchell, at 23, the youngest baker, up to Lesley Holloway and Leighton Morgan, tied at 59 as the series' oldest.

A record-tying Star Baker run

Jasmine Mitchell's five Star Baker titles across the series put her in rare company: only one other contestant in the show's history has matched that count. Winning the whole series on top of that record is a genuinely unusual combination, since strong weekly form does not always translate into final-week success in a format that resets pressure completely for the last showstopper.

If you're working through the archive

Series 16 closes out the run covered here, following series 15, and it is worth watching alongside the very first series to see how far the format has traveled since 2010 with our recap of series 1. The full explainer on hosts, judges, and the coming Nigella Lawson era is in our Bake Off fan guide, and every champion since 2010 is listed in every Great British Bake Off winner. For anyone chasing a five-Star-Baker run at home, a good whisk is still the cheapest upgrade to consistent bakes.