How to Make Children's Cookbooks
There are thousands of cookbooks on the market. Walk into any bookstore and aisle upon aisle of cookbooks are available. The group of cooks often overlooked in all these recipes is the child. A children's cookbook is not always easy to find. When there is a cookbook available to children, many times the recipes are just as complex as the adult cookbooks. A good children's cookbook is not hard to put together when it is well planned. Does this Spark an idea?
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Things You'll Need
- Access to a computer with a word processor
- Camera
- Basic cooking skills
- Test kitchen/subjects
Instructions
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Determine the layout of the cookbook. This means allocate recipes to chapters. Start with appetizers/snacks and move on to breads/baked goods. Keeping the chapters in alphabetical order makes referencing the cookbook easier for children.
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Create recipes with readily available ingredients. Children get discouraged easily. If they cannot create a recipe because of a missing ingredient, they will be disappointed quickly.
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Choose recipes that will appeal to children and are fun to make. Test subjects are great for this step. Choose your own children or neighborhood kids (with parents' permission) to spend a day creating and testing recipes. The kids will have fun and learn something, and you will know whether the recipe is worth putting in the cookbook.
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Take pictures of the finished creations. These pictures should be taken with a digital camera. If you do not own a digital camera, ask that developed pictures be put on disk. They can then be stored in a digital format for later publishing. Pictures can also help illustrate steps that may be unclear.
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Type the recipes into the word processor. Add photographs as needed for better illustration. Save the entire file in PDF form.
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Create an account on one of the self-publishing sites. Upload the PDF file. Offer the book to anyone interested in a child's cookbook.
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Another way to offer the cookbook is to print each copy out as it is ordered. This cookbook can be used as a fund-raiser for camping troops, classrooms or other youth organizations.
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Tips & Warnings
Keep recipes simple. Each recipe should be no more than five or six ingredients. Black and white photographs are better for the self-published book.
Use words of caution all through the cookbook, warning about such hazards as hot ingredients, handles on pans and using the proper utensils. Remind young cooks about food allergies. Many kids are not familiar with shellfish allergies or milk allergies.
