At 30, after office-based jobs, Julie Jones realised what she loved was feeding people and that it wasn’t too late to retrain. But on graduating from catering college in Carlisle, she found out she was pregnant and her mum, Joyce Armstrong, began to show early signs of dementia. Her desire to work in restaurants, such as the Fat Duck and Hind’s Head in Bray, where she did work experience, became a side-line to family.
In 2013, she started an Instagram account, @julie_jonesuk, aka Soulful Baker. At first, it was used sporadically, photos of her kids and flowers – and her friends had to tell her about hashtags, and how you could connect with people. “I remember saying to my husband, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve got 100 followers,’” says Jones, now 40, and winner of the OFM award for Best Instagram Feed. “I’ve got such lovely followers. It’s a very supportive community.”
An impulse to bake a cake with her mum one afternoon was not an attempt at the domestic therapy it became. Her mum was becoming increasingly agitated and needing lots of attention and reassurance, and with her children also requiring attention, it was moment of desperation. “I said: ‘Oh come on, we’ll make a cake’ and the difference was unbelievable.”
By that stage, Joyce couldn’t read recipes or understand instructions. “If I said to her ‘Pick that sieve up and sift the flour into the bowl’ she wouldn’t know what the sieve or the bowl was. Yet if I placed it in her hand, she would know what to do.” Jones, who had baked with her mum growing up, believes her mum responded to feeling like she was still able to do things. “It totally transformed her and calmed her down.” Baking together became a weekly thing, documented on her feed.
Jones came to rely on Instagram in October 2015, after her mother went into full-time care. “I would get the kids to bed and start doing all these fancy intricate pastries,” she says. She’d then share the photosand, something she found hard to do with those closest to her, share if she’d had a bad day. “I was grief-stricken – I know it was grief now – and it really helped, people reaching out saying they’d gone through the same.”
Three years on, Jones is able to share the good moments she has with her mum and continues to post shots of her cooking, and talk about Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Amazingly, she still uses only uses her phone to photograph her work. More amazingly, Jones says that baking was never her favourite part of her chef’s training, and she never really plans what she’ll make. Recently, a lemon tart, decorated with a crescent of strawberries and redcurrants, she made was regrammed by Food 52, picking up 75,819 likes on their feed and 27,445 on hers. A single post that gained her 7,000 followers. “It went bonkers, and really, it took no time to do. I just threw some fruit on top. I think it’s the contrasting colours and the way the light hits it that people liked.”
She has 90,000 followers, sell-out supper clubs, and her cookbook, The Soulful Baker, with a second one being discussed. And it all comes back to Instagram. Her commissioning editor was a follower, and when Jones hit 10,000 followers, she got a private message saying, “Can we talk …”
Jones never saw being an author in her future, nor messaging with Jamie Oliver, then travelling to London to cook with him. “It’s just crazy. Instagram has taken me in directions I never saw coming.”
