Bake Off star Kim-Joy accentuates the positive

“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.”

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, adding that 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”.

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 she 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,” she 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.”

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.”

Bake Joy: Easy And Imaginative Bakes To Bring You Happiness by Kim-Joy is published by Quadrille on Thursday, priced £16.99.