Personalized Recipe Books

There are always recipes in your family which you love and want to pass on to your children – think of Aunty Loma’s tomato sauce, Nana’s Mousse, Mum’s Louise Slice – so many great recipes that are in danger of being lost for future generations unless you take the time to compile them together in one place.

When your child leaves home I think one of the best gifts you can give them is a recipe book and what better idea than one containing their favourite family recipes?   Of course you could just buy them a recipe book – I brought my brother one called How to Live Off the Smell of an Oily Rag when he went off to college which I thought sounded good.   A better idea, however, is to make one up for them which I think just makes it all the more special as you’ve compiled it with love.

A binder can be a great way of compiling family recipes, but if your child is off to college or even overseas binders can take up more space than a simple notebook and I’ve found some great recipe notebooks available to buy online.

These recipe notebooks can all be customized to include their name if you want to.

It’s not just children who appreciate these recipe books either as I compiled a couple of recipe books for my hubby when we were first married.   We didn’t have the internet way back then (shock, horror) and so I got a couple of photo albums and I wrote up a couple of his mum’s recipes, cut out some that I thought he’d like from a stash of women’s magazines and even managed to get his Aunty Loma to part with her special tomato sauce recipe.  

My hubby loved cooking and we still have ‘his recipe book’ and quite by chance one of the recipes I ‘found’ in a magazine was one that he already had had cut out and had lost before being able to use it – was I the best wife in the world that first Christmas?   I certainly was!

I love collecting cocktail recipes and I write and blog about them – I have sooo many cocktail books it’s not funny, but I have lost some of my own recipes when I’ve written them down on some note paper and haven’t transferred them to the computer – aaaagghh!

I love the fact that you can get notebooks designed to hold cocktail recipes – check them out.

I ‘invent’ a whole new cocktail which if it tastes good needs to be written down (because you just know I’ll forget it by the next day!) or I look through a trusty recipe book to find something else to mix.

My favourite type of recipe book has to be a sweet one, so it’s fantastic that you can also get some delicious looking recipe notebooks that are designed to gather your favourite cake or dessert recipes in.   My MIL’s recipe book had one of my hubby’s favourite cakes in it and as he doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth I really wished I owned the book as my SIL had it and it has now mysteriously disappeared!

If you have one of these gorgeous looking books you could collect the recipes you and your family love right away and keep them safe for you all to enjoy.   I know I wish I’d gotten a recipe off of my nan, which I eventually managed to find as well as one off of my gran as they both had sweet tooths like me.

Whether you want to take note of cupcake recipes, dessert recipes or cake recipes you really can’t go past these spiral bound notebooks to keep track of them all.