Bake Your Way To Happiness: Recipes and Strategies to Nourish and Heal

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It’s all about a balancing act between time, temperature and ingredients: That’s the art of baking.” – Peter Reinhart As the bakers got their heads down to the challenge, Alison discovered that Josh’s tiger mascot, which he takes to all the Leicester Tigers matches, had no name. So she took it upon herself to christen it (Paul, in case you were wondering) with a sprinkling of water. Why has it taken so many years for her to be on the programme?!

Baking is . . . Life. So when you describe what you’re making, you must describe life.” – Jenny Colgan Kim-Joy’s turtle ginger biscuit. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian Kim-Joy’s ginger biscuits recipe

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I'll admit to being envious of my fellow employee-owner Caitlin, who has won the cupcake contest TWICE! Caitlin's winning molten-chocolate cupcakes topped with ultra raspberry frosting were followed by spiced cupcakes filled with bourbon caramel and boiled cider in the frosting. How do you compete with that?

Love is like a good cake. You never know when it’s coming, but you’d better eat it when it does!” – C. JoyBell C. Nice memories are like chocolate: you can’t survive on them alone, as they aren’t very filling, but they make life sweeter.” – Janine Weger You can tell the strength in a feeling by the sacrifices you are willing to make for it. (Chinese wisdom) I’ll often come across our test kitchen manager, Charlotte, standing silently at her workbench with a slight inquisitive smile on her face, tasting something new. I don’t bother to interrupt — she might be making a masterpiece (like the Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza she developed for our Recipe of the Year). 10. We challenge ourselves in new ways through baking.That is perhaps what drives Bake Off, the delightful contradictions of making competitors out of people who, by their nature, collaborate; yet this isn’t the first niche competitive scenario to change Kim-Joy’s life. She is also into board games, and recently came second in a Splendor tournament. The board-games world “is quite male dominated,” she says, “so if you look really girly, people think you don’t know what you’re doing.” This is how she met Nabil, her partner, the inspiration behind the bee-decorated doughnuts she made on the show. He owns four board-game shops in the centre of Leeds, and she met him at a board-game club night, because, yes, those really exist. You are born to achieve great things if you know how to defeat yourself. (loosely based on Bruce Lee) Peter’s win was never in doubt. The only of the three finalists not to self-identify as the underdog when the episode began, he calmly overachieved during all three of the challenges; turning round a set of elaborate Cranachan custard slices in the opener and a sterling “Bonkers Bake Off Bubble Cake” showstopper. The only thing that slowed his path to victory was the walnut whirl technical challenge, but then again you’d struggle to produce a walnut whirl in a gazebo during a 35C heatwave. Technically, if you don’t cut the cake and just eat the whole thing with a fork, you are still only eating one piece. We might have a new name and look, but we are who we've always been. As a result, our values remain unchanged. We believe in joy; we share our joy; and we create joy.

The study, published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, suggests that people who frequently take a turn at small, creative projects report feeling more relaxed and happier in their everyday lives. The researchers followed 658 people for about two weeks, and found that doing small, everyday things like cooking and baking made the group feel more enthusiastic about their pursuits the next day, Daisy Meager reports for Munchies. There were some pretty amazing creations presented to the judges, but as we all know, the looks are just half the battle. These masterpieces have to taste great, too. If you are going to be using chocolate ganache to fill and coat a cake, it ideally needs to be the consistency of room temperature peanut butter before you work with it. Over the years, I’ve stumbled across a ton of cake-themed sayings and quotes about cake. Many have ended up on t-shirts or dish towels. But that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to create a post filled to overflowing with shareable cake quotes that cake bakers would enjoy. At King Arthur Baking Company, baking brings us joy in all these ways and more. Let us show you how the joyful practice of baking is key to who we are as a company: 1. We bake to celebrate success and milestones.Eating cake every day is totally acceptable and justifiable. After all, it’s somebody's birthday somewhere in the world. Love is when you have a mouth-watering slice of cake, and it's the very last piece, but you let your loved ones have it.