cooking up something sweet

I definitely got my love for cooking things from my mom.  As you may have noticed, most all the recipes I share are from her.  She has so many cookbooks with recipe cards spilling out.  We have tried in years past to make her a book to keep the recipes in, so that she won't loose the recipe cards or the print outs.  However, it never fails that the book winds up being slam packed with recipes in no real organized manner.  This Christmas I decided to make her something a little different.  I took all of the recipes she uses at Christmastime and compiled them into one cookbook.

I used one of my favorite sites, Shutterfly!  I made what they call a photo book.  Usually one would fill these with pictures and maybe short captions to share.  I have made photo books for numerous occasions (remember my wedding guest books?).

I first got the recipes I wanted to use.  I had my sister scan the recipes and email them to me.  It doesn't really matter what way you get the recipes, because when you are done you will have the recipe online.

I created a photo book at www.Shutterfly.com and made one of the pages in each spread (two pages facing each other) text only.  They have an option with one title and two columns specially for recipe books which I used.  I then added in pictures of my sisters and I as well as family pictures.  You could easily put pictures of the foods in the cookbook but, I knew family pictures would mean more to my mom.

On Shutterfly you get to choose the backgrounds of the pages.  I chose to do one page in the spread green and the other red.  They have so many cute backgrounds, it was so hard to choose.  They have them for ALL occasions from babies to birthdays to holidays, they have everything covered.

My mom loved the recipe book.  I know, I know she just has one more cookbook on the overflowing shelf.  Though, hopefully one day we will be able to turn the loose recipe cards and print outs into printed cookbooks.  Hey, it's a start!