How to make a book part 3
"I was not made to be subtle"
Yes indeed. You are now looking at a 5-layer chocolate peanut butter cake, and it isn’t for the faint-hearted. But how do you develop a recipe for a cake like this in the first place? I will list all of our tips for you below. And if you have any further questions, just let us know.
Coming up with new recipes is truly something else. For food-themed magazines or whenever a celebrity wants to make a cook book, recipe developers are often employed. It’s important that a recipe isn’t just delicious, but also clearly written.
It has to be suitable for people who’ll be making your dish for the first time, but also for the experienced baker. Naturally, you want your recipe to be a success without people feeling the need to add anything extra to it, or try out something else from a book or magazine. Sadly, I have experienced many times that a recipe I had found on a blog turned out to be all wrong. You don’t just randomly start changing things to a recipe, especially not when you’re cooking vegan and gluten free.
Tips & Tricks
1. Know your basics. It actually helped us a lot that we had already been baking with regular products long before we started doing this. That is, we know how different ingredients react to each other, and what the purpose is of eggs and gluten for example. When you know this, it’s easier to know how you can replace such ingredients. For example, coconut cream makes gluten free flour a lot less dry, and a mix of different kinds of gluten free flour also brings more flavour to the dish.
2. We love talking about food, which is why we started Food Bandits in the first place. We often talk about what we’d like to have for dinner and what would go well with it. We kinda make a game out of it. Whenever I read a cook book, I try to imagine how certain combinations of flavours work together, so I can use those combination in my own recipes as well.
3. I’m no lawyer, but I wouldn’t recommend copying someone else’s recipe word for word. At the very least, it is incredibly rude and unfair to the person, who has put all their time and effort in creating the recipe. But on the other hand, how would you even proof your apple pie recipe is original? Everyone has had a slice of apple pie in their lives (I assume, because if not, you’re seriously living your life wrong). You should always try to adjust the recipe, and personally I find it most honest to list the source of the original recipe, and to get the original creator’s permission to use said recipe.
4. Note everything down and test things out. Scattered throughout the entire house, we have numerous notebooks with countless recipes that we try out. For our first cook book, we already had half of the required recipes because of this. The only downside of us is that we don’t keep track of our notes very well. For example, we have six different versions for chocolate cake, but haven’t a clue which one was the really delicious one again. Always have a notebook laying nearby to write stuff in and make sure to test out each recipe at least twice. That way you avoid disappointment. And if you have the honour of creating your own cook book, please make sure to ask your friends, family and other nice people from Instagram for their opinion. They’ll come with questions and suggestions that you hadn’t thought of before, I can assure you.
Also fun:
Article from the NY Times
Next time, we’ll discuss the creation of the book further, and please do not hesitate to ask questions or come forward with your own tips and suggestions.
Part one How to make a book
Part two How to make a book