I love colour, cute things and Christmas spices
INGREDIENTS
(serves 12-14)
500ml whole milk;
1tbsp vanilla bean paste (or 2 vanilla pods); 200g caster or granulated sugar; 2 medium eggs; 2 medium egg yolks; 50g salted butter, melted, plus extra butter, for greasing; 100g strong white bread flour; 3 ½tbsp rum decorated with festive pandas.
With such delicate and seemingly perfect decorations, some people might be put off 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 Off, 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 can lose yourself in and forget about time. Not only that, but at the end you have a bake and you feel really productive. You can give it to somebody else and feel even more useful.”
Like so many of us, Kim-Joy is planning a low-key Christmas. “It’s just going to be me and my partner, Nabil, and our cats
Inki and Mochi,” she says with obvious delight.
“We’ll get them some treats and put stockings up and decorate – it will be lovely.”
Christmas With Kim-Joy: A Festive Collection Of Edible Cuteness by Kim-Joy is published by Quadrille, priced £15. Photography by Ellis Parrinder.