Kim-Joy: ‘Baking shouldn’t be about perfectionism – it should be about embracing your inner child’

It might be surprising for someone who made it to the final of The Great British Bake Off, but Kim-Joy says she tries “to not be a perfectionist”.

She won over fans for her cute animal-inspired bakes on the show back in 2018, making the final alongside Ruby Bhogal and eventual winner Rahul Mandal.

“I try to not be a perfectionist – a lot of people tell me, ‘You’re a perfectionist!’ It’s a compliment, and it’s all meaning well because they mean you’re paying attention to details, which is a good thing.

“But I see paying attention to details as a different thing to being a perfectionist… being a perfectionist is inside of you, where nothing’s ever good enough and you’re constantly critical of what you do.”

That’s why Leeds-based Kim-Joy, 33, tries not to strive for absolute perfection – as she knows that can often lead to you feeling “bad about yourself” if you bake something that’s not up to scratch.

“Even if you create something that is 99 to 100 per cent perfect, you’re like, ‘Well, I have to keep doing that – or do better next time’,” she says, as your driving force can then become “negative” thoughts.

She says perfectionism “often connects with low self-esteem, [if] your core belief about yourself is ‘I’m not good enough’, or ‘people won’t like me unless I do things very well’,” – which she says is “super crushing and is “something I always see in myself”.

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So that’s why Kim-Joy tries to rid herself of expectations when baking, saying it allows her to be “fully creative, like a child”.

If it sounds like Kim-Joy knows her stuff about psychology, that’s bang on – before Bake Off, she was a psychological wellbeing practitioner, and she even has a masters in psychology. All of these she applies to her new world of baking – and you’d be surprised how well the two go together.

“A lot of my interest in baking isn’t just purely the baking, a lot of it is about… helping my own mental health, and hopefully other people’s mental health – I feel like that informs everything I do,” Kim-Joy explains.

At the end of 2021, Kim-Joy shared a candid post on Instagram about her mental health, alongside a picture of the antidepressant she takes every day.

“I’ve been on various different antidepressants since I was a teenager, but it’s only since about a year ago that I started sharing with a few people about being on antidepressants. Even when friends would talk to me about they themselves taking it, I still wouldn’t share that I took it,” she wrote.

“I had a traumatic and chaotic childhood with close family having very severe mental illness, so I’ve always felt like I need to be the adult and that means I need to appear ‘strong’ so that I’m there for others, even when I feel scared.”

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Casting her mind back to publishing that post, she says she wanted to “push myself” to be vulnerable, adding: “I really think one of the most therapeutic things is hearing other people’s stories and not feeling alone. When I hear other people’s story and I connect with that, I want to do the same. Vulnerability is strength.”

Kim-Joy says that how she expresses herself “tends to not be through talking, but through creative pursuits” – like baking. This is particularly seen in her fifth cookbook, Bake Joy, which is all about how baking can help you reconnect with your inner child.

In true Kim-Joy style, most of the bakes have a “little face on it” – think meringues with googly eyes and a pound cake that looks like a dog – or “a little twist”, like the thumbprint cookies that look like a magic forest.

“I get a lot of inspiration from kids… they’ve got freedom and creativity, and think of things slightly differently sometimes,” Kim-Joy says.

So baking is a way to “get back that joy you have when you’re a child” – and you certainly don’t have to worry if anything goes wrong with the recipes.

“It doesn’t matter, because it’s still going to taste good – even if it’s not perfect,” she adds. Baking might have “science to it”, there’s “also a bit of chaos to it”.

So if you embrace the chaos, you can see things going wrong as an opportunity: “If your chocolate cake falls apart, you can utilise that and create something different” – like her cake which is decorated with chocolate ganache and marshmallow pigs, who look like they’re eating chunks out of the sponge.

A good recipe to start with are her frog scones, which Kim-Joy describes as “a nice bit of chaos”. The way the scones cook mean they’ll inevitably end up slightly mismatched and leaning to different sides, “So they all come out different – it’s really hard to go wrong with scones”.

Ultimately, the best thing to do is find a recipe you want to eat – whether that’s custard tart, lemon meringue pie, sprinkle sponge – anything. One thing you won’t find in the book are bananas, which Kim-Joy isn’t really a fan of (“so I’d never make anything like a banana sponge”).

Baking really is as simple as this: “You want to eat something tasty” – and go from there.

‘Bake Joy: Easy And Imaginative Bakes To Bring You Happiness’ by Kim-Joy (Quadrille, £16.99, available 29 August 29).