Last week, I asked my mommy darling to please take a picture of a page in her recipe book for me, because I knew she had a recipe I could use. Thinking of my mom’s huge recipe book brought back MANY happy memories of baking with my mom when we were kids!
My mommy darling with her recipe book – an old fashioned accounts ledger given to her by my dad forever ago!
Hauling it out of the bookshelf, we’d page through it till we got to our favourite cookie or cake recipe, looking at recipes we’d never tried, talking about trying something we’d never done before… Even my grown up son has wonderful memories of my mom’s recipe book! It has recipes in it written out for her by my Granny Sheila and my Ouma Jean – those are absolute treasures in my eyes!
That got me thinking about how the internet has changed the way we look for and use recipes… Many of us have gone from a book stuck full of pages torn from magazines, and hand-written recipes, to an electronic device of some kind. We have easy access to a whole world of recipes, and be able to convert cups or ounces to grams, thanks to that device’s browser!
I have a huge collection of recipe books – cakes, cupcakes, sweets, cookies, and cake decorating.
My favourite recipe book is not hand-written, but I have written some of my favourite recipes into the front and back pages of the book (the blankones). I also have a wooden binder filled with plastic sleeves that I use to file the recipes I do find in magazines, and printed copies of recipes I find on the internet. It’s not the same as my mom’s big book, though…
This one is layers of red, yellow, and blue vanilla cake for a Wonderwoman-themed birthday party! The chocolate cupcakes have red, yellow , and blue tri-coloured buttercream swirls!
I absolutely fell in love with this sugar paste cake topper, I almost didn’t want to let her go! <3 😀 She’s sitting on a single-tier vanilla cake decorated with little sugar paste blocks, and polka dots in shades of pink and grey.
Along with the cake, there was an order of vanilla cupcakes, decorated with my signature “Soft Serve” vanilla and strawberry buttercream!
This is a two-tiered vanilla cake – with chopped fudge between the layers!
Hannah’s fifth birthday had a ladybug theme, and her cake – decorated with red and black polkadots and flowers – was topped with a pair of giggly ladybirds, hand made by me.