Christmas with Kim-Joy: A Festive Collection of Edible Cuteness

Any fan of the Great British Bake Off will know only need to hear the words “Kim-Joy” to remember the delightful baker whose whimsy and technique made her a fan favorite. Her adorable animal designs repeatedly won over experienced bakers and beginners with her creativity, her sweetness, and the sublime joy she got from baking. Now she’s back with a second baking book, this one filled with fun and delightful ideas for Christmas baking. Christmas with Kim-Joy is filled with recipes for cookies, cakes, and numerous treats as well as decorating ideas that are festive and adorable. Expect bakes adorned with or baked to look like foxes, penguins, snowmen, reindeer, turtles, seals, polar bears, panda bears, and owls. She starts with cookies, offering up recipes for shortbread, speculoos, and ginger cookies and a recipe for Royal Icing that you can use to create and decorate any number of cookie ideas, from individual iced cookies to a gingerbread (or speculoos) house. Kim-Joy also has a couple of cake recipes and a few breads you can try. She has recipes and tips for macarons and meringues. But most of her recipes are for little treats, and this is where she lets her creativity and design ideas run wild. There are Reindeer Bakewell Tarts, Christmas Pudding Chocolate Orange Profiteroles, Irish Cream Snowman Choux, Yuzu Curd Santa Tartlets with Strawberries and Cream, Hedgehog German Cookies, Festive Bunny Madeleines, Marshmallow Seals in a While Chocolate Igloo, Arctic Fox Sandwich Cookies, and Owl Apple Pies, among others. She offers vegan options wherever she can, and many of the recipes (like the Penguin Mincemeat Bao) include step-by-step photos to help you see just how she made them. But as always, it’s Kim-Joy’s ingenious ideas in design and decoration that lifts her recipes with those adorable creatures and playful innovations. Fans of Kim-Joy will not want to miss out on this cookbook!

First and foremost, I love how create Kim joy is. It’s why I gave this book five stars. Anyone can give me a recipe for a macaron... but a teddy bear with a Santa hat. And who knew I needed cookie of a dinosaur wearing a scarf in my life?!? With that being said, there are a few of the same recipes as the previous book. I get why though.... You are probably going to want a recipe for short bread cookie, gingerbread cookie, ginger bread house idea/step by step tips and tips on working with icing on cookies in a holiday cookbook. I was a little disappointed in seeing the same macarons flavors. Her recipes for the fillings are soooo good! I would love to try new flavors. But, I will get over it because there are many other new recipes to try. I highly recommend this book. Kim Joy does a phenomenal job of keeping the instructions simple and easy to follow. She also provides metric and us measurements. There is pretty much a photo of each bake in the book. The book also shows her colorful and fun personality. It’s not your typical cookbook, which is right up my alley. I will continue to buy her books. They always bring a smile to my face.

Kim Joy was one of my favorite contestants on the GBBO, so naturally I was excited to check out her books! I’m a experienced baker, but I’m not great at presentation and decorating, so I was hoping this would inspire me to create more appetizing and cute creations, and it did not disappoint. I’ve made the owl apple pies, the snow fox cookies, the polar bear buns and the turtles breads. All were tasty and although mine weren’t as attractive as Kim Joys, the looked pretty good. This book might be a bit challenging for the beginner baker, but any baker with experience should find her recipes very accessible. I’m an American baker and wondered if some ingredients would be hard to find or involve equipment not easily found in my area, but so far I haven’t had any issues with that. I also like that she has vegan options.

Kim-Joy is one of my favorite Great British Baking Show contestants ever! Her recipes are whimsical and fun!

Kim Joy is great and this book is full of cute delicious treats

Not one of my favorites. The instructions are written well and so are the ingredients. This is not a book for beginners.

This is such an amazingly well written/illustrated book. Kim’s creations are sweet, amusing, and utterly heart-warming!!! This book would be a blessing to the book shelf of every home celebrating the Winter/Christmas Holiday Season

I really like this book. It’s fun to look at, super cute pics. My toddlers like to flip through the pages with me. I’ve tried one recipe so far, it wasn’t too complicated and the cookies were delicious!

The recipes are easy to follow and she includes so many vegan and gluten-free options that, for this person with weird food allergies, made desserts more accessible.

Love the unique ideas! Loved Kim-Joy on Bake-Off and love all the originality in this book!

Any fan of the Great British Bake Off will know only need to hear the words “Kim-Joy” to remember the delightful baker whose whimsy and technique made her a fan favorite. Her adorable animal designs repeatedly won over experienced bakers and beginners with her creativity, her sweetness, and the sublime joy she got from baking. Now she’s back with a second baking book, this one filled with fun and delightful ideas for Christmas baking. Christmas with Kim-Joy is filled with recipes for cookies, cakes, and numerous treats as well as decorating ideas that are festive and adorable. Expect bakes adorned with or baked to look like foxes, penguins, snowmen, reindeer, turtles, seals, polar bears, panda bears, and owls. She starts with cookies, offering up recipes for shortbread, speculoos, and ginger cookies and a recipe for Royal Icing that you can use to create and decorate any number of cookie ideas, from individual iced cookies to a gingerbread (or speculoos) house. Kim-Joy also has a couple of cake recipes and a few breads you can try. She has recipes and tips for macarons and meringues. But most of her recipes are for little treats, and this is where she lets her creativity and design ideas run wild. There are Reindeer Bakewell Tarts, Christmas Pudding Chocolate Orange Profiteroles, Irish Cream Snowman Choux, Yuzu Curd Santa Tartlets with Strawberries and Cream, Hedgehog German Cookies, Festive Bunny Madeleines, Marshmallow Seals in a While Chocolate Igloo, Arctic Fox Sandwich Cookies, and Owl Apple Pies, among others. She offers vegan options wherever she can, and many of the recipes (like the Penguin Mincemeat Bao) include step-by-step photos to help you see just how she made them. But as always, it’s Kim-Joy’s ingenious ideas in design and decoration that lifts her recipes with those adorable creatures and playful innovations. Fans of Kim-Joy will not want to miss out on this cookbook!

First and foremost, I love how create Kim joy is. It’s why I gave this book five stars. Anyone can give me a recipe for a macaron... but a teddy bear with a Santa hat. And who knew I needed cookie of a dinosaur wearing a scarf in my life?!? With that being said, there are a few of the same recipes as the previous book. I get why though.... You are probably going to want a recipe for short bread cookie, gingerbread cookie, ginger bread house idea/step by step tips and tips on working with icing on cookies in a holiday cookbook. I was a little disappointed in seeing the same macarons flavors. Her recipes for the fillings are soooo good! I would love to try new flavors. But, I will get over it because there are many other new recipes to try. I highly recommend this book. Kim Joy does a phenomenal job of keeping the instructions simple and easy to follow. She also provides metric and us measurements. There is pretty much a photo of each bake in the book. The book also shows her colorful and fun personality. It’s not your typical cookbook, which is right up my alley. I will continue to buy her books. They always bring a smile to my face.

Kim Joy was one of my favorite contestants on the GBBO, so naturally I was excited to check out her books! I’m a experienced baker, but I’m not great at presentation and decorating, so I was hoping this would inspire me to create more appetizing and cute creations, and it did not disappoint. I’ve made the owl apple pies, the snow fox cookies, the polar bear buns and the turtles breads. All were tasty and although mine weren’t as attractive as Kim Joys, the looked pretty good. This book might be a bit challenging for the beginner baker, but any baker with experience should find her recipes very accessible. I’m an American baker and wondered if some ingredients would be hard to find or involve equipment not easily found in my area, but so far I haven’t had any issues with that. I also like that she has vegan options.

Kim-Joy is one of my favorite Great British Baking Show contestants ever! Her recipes are whimsical and fun!

Kim Joy is great and this book is full of cute delicious treats

Not one of my favorites. The instructions are written well and so are the ingredients. This is not a book for beginners.

This is such an amazingly well written/illustrated book. Kim’s creations are sweet, amusing, and utterly heart-warming!!! This book would be a blessing to the book shelf of every home celebrating the Winter/Christmas Holiday Season

I really like this book. It’s fun to look at, super cute pics. My toddlers like to flip through the pages with me. I’ve tried one recipe so far, it wasn’t too complicated and the cookies were delicious!

The recipes are easy to follow and she includes so many vegan and gluten-free options that, for this person with weird food allergies, made desserts more accessible.

Love the unique ideas! Loved Kim-Joy on Bake-Off and love all the originality in this book!

This is a beautiful cookbook with wonderful pictures and easy to follow recipes.

Love this book for myself and as gift

What a perfect Christmas gift.

I love Kim-Joy and her personality, she was one of my favorite bakers from the UK series 9 (the US release makes a mess of the seasons, use the original UK series/season #’s to follow chronologically), so I have purchased all 3 of her books to support her and have a book of her creations. My favorite books are her first, Baking with Kim Joy, and her most recent release, Celebrations; they have a wider coverage of bakes. I realize this is a Christmas book and the recipes and decorations are around the holidays, and I love that. My issue with this book is that there are just a lot of repeats across her books. Listed below are either in the same book or repeats from one book to the next. *Profiteroles: pigs, Christmas pudding profiteroles etc. in different books *Macarons: round ornaments, koalas, watercolor/painted and bears *Meringues: monster meringues, snowman meringues, snail body meringues *Madelines: cats, pandas etc. *Cut-out cookies w/ royal icing (repeated again) (I’d love to see a butter cream frosting decoration idea, I know royal icing allows for so much artistic expression, but Swiss or Italian buttercream frosting just tastes so much better, yet isn’t showcased in artistic ways as often in cookbooks for cut out cookies) *Round cut-out Sandwich cookies as different animals in each book. Same cookie shape just different ears etc. and different base flavor. Ex.: Robins, Foxes, Bears.cute ideas, but not needed in each book. This book definitely covers flavor and cute ideas (love), and I’m not against different design ideas and different characters using the same shape or dessert base, but I’d rather see it in one book all together, or, if you’re going to do the same basic recipe or cut-puts in each book, add a couple more recipes. Otherwise it feels like filler recipes and nothing particularly new. I loved the flavors (as always), as well as her German butter cookie hedgehogs, baked egg nog cup latte bakes, the ginger roulade cake, and the penguin bao buns. I also really liked the skill building recipes using glucose syrup and gelatins for clear, spherical snow globe creations and white chocolate rounded igloos. These are excellent beginner skill building recipes for people who haven’t worked with ingredients and techniques that are not often found at the local market (like glucose syrup, gelatins sheets etc.). Loved that! There aren’t really any cakes in here, excepting the Swiss roll (roulade) and a pretty basic Bundt cake; however, it is a Christmas treats books, so I see why this may not have as many cakes as “Celebrate with Kim Joy”. Overall, it’s a cute book with some very nice ideas and a couple of recipes I may try, but if you’re choosing which of her books to get, I’d start with her first, Bake w/ Kim Joy, or, Celebrate with Kim Joy. They have a broader number of recipes in each category and it feels like you’re getting more in those books for the sake price. I really do love her creations, I simply prefer her other two books and would like to see a bit less repetition.

If you have the first book, there aren't a ton of ground breaking recipes that are different nor any new techniques really. I was pretty disappointed. I would maybe wait until your local library stocks it.

My granddaughter started baking after watching Kim-Joy and so have I. I haven’t baked in years and this book is a fabulous way to start!

What a cute well written absolutely happy looking book! Very easy to read and just like Kim Joy her recipes are designed to make you happy

Kim-Joy's designs are wonderful. I watched her on The Great British Baking Show and fell in love with her imagination and use of various animals in her designs. She almost won the whole thing the season I watched her bake and I find her very inspiring. She's British, but the amounts show American conversions so you don't need to work that out yourself. I bought all three of her cookbooks. I think she's great.

I bought this book for my daughter because she loved Kim-Joy from the Great British Bake-Off show. The book is really cute with bright illustrations, but the recipes are not realistic to make, even for older pre-teens. We will just read the book and probably donate it. Thank you!

What is there not to adore about Kim Joy and her creations. Wonderful!

Loved it. Great recipes with vegan options too :) Kim-Joy is obviously a very talented baker so not sure I’ll ever be able to paint anything that doesn’t look like a 4 year old’s art on royal icing but I can try!!

I've already got Kim Joy's first book so it was great that I received this as a birthday present in November, as big Kim Joy fans (she should have won Bake Off) I bought this as a Christmas gift for my daughter.

Just like her first book this is filled with lots of cute animals in the form of biscuits and cakes which are so imaginative. Seems to be a lot of new designs to traditional bakes but alot of new recipes from different parts of the world which I'm excited to try!

Wow! this exceeded my expectations, I was delighted to find some of the recipes are offered in vegan too! I love all the quirky little ideas and the differing festive flavours, I can’t wait to spend some of my December trying some of these

I'm not a baker at all, but I have to say it is really cute, and is all Christmas themed. The pictures are frankly adorable. The pigs are back too. I might even give it a go, the instructions seem simple enough even for me.

Bought it way in advance as a Christmas present for my young daughter. It’s a beautiful book with all the Kim-joy magic! Can’t wait to start baking! Beautiful pics inside too :)