Creature comforts
Bake Off’s Kim-Joy Hewlett tells ELLA WALKER how she finds peace making sweet animals
BAKE Off finalist Kim-Joy Hewlett is all about ‘feel-goodness’. The cover of her new cook book is a sunny yellow and she reckons it matches the inside of her brain ‘with frogs hopping round it, and little creatures’.
Inside the cover, there are many delicately wrought creatures to make and then eat – sugar paste space turtles, pigs as profiteroles, cat-shaped buns, koala macarons, bear madeleines, meringue ghosts, and cookies in every cat, deer, bunny and honey bee form.
It’s like stepping into a fairy tale world, one that miraculously avoids being too cutesy.
Perhaps it’s because these critters have a fleeting joy to them, rather than a contrived adorableness.
Kim-Joy, 28, likes to try new things all the time, so although the base might be a tried-andtested staple, when it comes to decorating a biscuit or a cake, “I want it to be different each time.”
Her savoury cooking gets anthropomorphised too. “If I make a pizza, I still like to do faces,” she says, and her tarka dal? “I probably wouldn’t decorate that... I could probably think of a way to decorate it...”
Surprisingly, Kim-Joy has no real art background. Born in Belgium to a Malaysian-Chinese mother and English father, she moved to the outskirts of London aged five, and none of her family are arty or bakers.
Her desire to decorate comes entirely from within. “I’m just focused on what I’m doing, and that’s what’s so therapeutic about it,” she says of piping and the peace it brings.
“When you’re decorating a biscuit, you’re just busy doing that, so you’re not thinking, until afterwards when you’re like, ‘Oh my god, the kitchen’s a mess, I’ve got to tidy up now’, and I’m like, ‘Nah, I don’t want to do that, I want a nap.”’
She is not militant about decoration though. She doesn’t expect everyone to find escape in festooning baked goods with intricate icing like her, and is clear that it takes repetition, practice, and mistake-making to get the knack.
“When I say things come out of mistakes, I genuinely mean that,” she says.
While some aspects of baking are a science, even when things go wrong, she’s adamant they’re still salvageable: “Like if you make choux pastry and it’s under baked, it tastes so good!”
And cracked meringues are just an opportunity to fill in the ridges and crevices with gold – “which is actually a Japanese technique called kintsugi,” she explains. “When their pottery breaks, instead of gluing it with invisible glue, you glue it with gold to highlight the cracks. It’s all about things that are broken being made more beautiful because they’re broken.”
Bake Off is now back for its 10th series, with a whole new roster of bakers hoping to wow judges Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood. As a finalist from last year, Kim-Joy has advice for those in this year’s tent.
“I’d say that it’s going to be tough, and to expect that it’s going to be tough, but it’s worth it. And however well you do, however far you get, you’ve done well just to be on there,” she says.
“A lot of the advice I got was, ‘Just enjoy it’, but I don’t know if I really found that helpful, because sometimes you feel pressure to enjoy it, and you feel like, ‘Oh, am I not enjoying it?’ And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
And on that note, she hands me a pink cardboard gift box containing a perfectly decorated alpaca biscuit. It’s iced in pale turquoise with yellow dotted flowers, and it’s smiling.
■ Baking With Kim-Joy: Cute And Creative Bakes To Make You Smile is out now from Quadrille, priced £18.99.