Last year, the girls and I had what we thought was a pretty rockin’ idea for mom’s Christmas gift. We would put together a family cookbook-a compilation of the classics-the things we eat at Christmas and on birthdays-the recipes handed down with love (and vague instructions) from great grandmas.
But maybe our biggest motivation was just to clean up mom’s recipe cupboard, which had pretty much become a recipe black hole. Stacks of unorganized papers of food we’d loved from neighbors and the Pioneer Woman and everyone in between. Those papers went in. And some of them never made it out.
Yes, it would be a minor miracle to clean that thing up.
But we did it. And here’s how…
I started by looking at several sites, trying to find one that would make a book that looked great at a reasonable price. A place that wouldn’t make us print dozens of copies with a system that would be intuitive enough that we could spend our time actually entering the recipes instead of just trying to figure out how. And it would be a complete bonus if the three of us could work on it collaboratively from the comfort of our own little computers-whenever and wherever we got a few minutes.
And that’s when I found Create My Cookbook. It was everything I’d been looking for.
So the short story is that the three of us-entirely online, without needing to download anything extra-typed up our favorite recipes and put them in a book that we all use on a regular basis. We loved the option of writing a dedication page and inserting pictures. We loved how simple it was to create and order exactly what we wanted.
I designed our cover and our dividers (Appetizers, Breakfast, Main Dishes, Side Dishes, Breads, and Desserts) in PicMonkey and uploaded them to Create My Cookbook. (If you want to do something similar and run into questions, email us! We’d be happy to help.)
Because we love our cookbooks so much, we wanted to partner with Create My Cookbook and give THREE of you the chance to win a $45 gift card on their site. Entering is easy and will show you just how simple it is to start your own book of memories and recipes! These cookbooks really are the perfect gift for those newlyweds, or grandma, or that daughter heading off to college, or hey-yourself! Do yourself a favor and clean out your recipe stash and put it all in one place.
Once you’ve registered, you can add a recipe to your book everyday for more entries!! So be sure to come back! All entries will be verified.
Thank you for the gift card opportunity! It was funny to run across this giveaway on Pinterest today- I had just started a cookbook on Create My Cookbook a couple of days ago.
What luck! So glad you found it. We really loved making our cookbook-you’ll love yours!!
What a great idea with the holiday’s right around the corner.
I want to learn how to make my own cookbook with recipes from my families. Shutterfly offers it but is there a better one?
Hi Karen! We really recommend the site we used that we talked about in this post, it’s called Create My Cookbook and we loved how easy it was to use and the end product.