I love colour, cute things and Christmas spices
| Published date | 19 December 2020 |
She admits Christmas might be "a bit weird and different this year" and says that's why "we need some good baking at home".
the Cookbook is everything we've come to love from Kim-Joy, full of sweet bakes made to look like cute animals and whimsical creatures. This includes snowmen meringues and reindeer Bakewell tarts, as well as recipes with more unusual flavours - like the matcha bamboo swiss roll decorated with festive pandas.
With such delicate and seemingly perfect decorations, some people might be put of f trying to tackle Kim-Joy's recipes. However, the baker is all for giving things a go in the kitchen.
"I taught myself to bake and I definitely got to a decent level by messing up a ton," she says. "And I still mess up - I just don't talk about it as much!"
For Kim-Joy, it's all part of the process. "I have had times I've messed up in the past and it's got me down for a little bit," she admits. "But after that, you pick yourself up and you learn from those mistakes - but they're not always mistakes."
" She has recently been applying the Japanese technique of kintsugi to her baking.This is the art of gluing broken pots back together and painting the cracks with gold, so that the breaks become part of something beautiful - and in the kitchen, Kim-Joy has been painting the cracks in her meringues gold.
"I think that perfectly encapsulates making mistakes and then making it work for you," she says. "And actually, it's even better."
" Even if things do go wrong, Kim-Joy still advocates baking to boost your mental health. Before entering Bake Of, she worked as a psychological wellbeing practitioner and says: "One of the treatments for depression is something called behaviour activation, which basically means getting people to slowly increase the amount of activities they're doing that they're enjoying. Because when you're feeling depressed and down, you don't want to do things - you don't have that motivation, and it's hard to get it back.
"Baking is one of those things that gives you a sense of purpose once you do it. It touches on all your senses, like feeling things, the smell of things and the taste of things, and it's also an activity you...
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