Your own biscuit baking book

The aroma of freshly baked biscuits is part of Christmas, like the decorations on the tree. So: give your nearest and dearest a sweet treat during the festive season and bake them something special. If you take photos during this you will also have the ingredients for a very personal gift: a baking book full of memories and family recipes. The best thing is that the main performers in the baking photo book are not the biscuits but instead your children, who are baking together with you.

Family recipesFlick through old baking books at home and with your relatives to find family biscuit recipes and combine these with your own favourite treats. As well as classics like vanilla crescents and cinnamon stars, a gingerbread house that the little ones can personalise is an absolute must. Muffins with Christmas motifs also look sweet: For example, you can conjure up the face of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the little cakes, using icing, biscuits and chocolate beans. Together with your little baking assistants, you are bound to come up with even more creative ideas!

The more people take part in the baking, the better! After all you need somebody to take the pictures and at least two in front of the camera. Before your baking day, think about what you want your baking book to look like. How many pictures do you want to plan in for each recipe? Arrange your ingredients into little mounds of flour and sugar and set out some eggs and butter. When baking with children, the imperfect is actually just right: the flour scattered on the table, the spilt sugar pearls– these little details and the smiles of the baking children bring the pictures to life.

Try out different page templates in ifolor Designer for Windows or Mac. This way, you can, for example, combine large and small pictures with each other and either devote whole pages to the recipes (text fields) or incorporate them into the picture layout.

As well as the ingredients, plan in plenty of sugar pearls, food colouring and icing. The more colour there is, the more beautiful your biscuits, gingerbread house and photos will be. Even the bakers' clothing should be chosen to go with the event and the time of year! You should certainly have baking aprons. Attractive kitchen towels and biscuit moulds are also suitable for arrangement on your pictures.

If you do not have professional photographic equipment with a lighting set, you are more dependent on daylight - so-called "available light". You should avoid your camera's built-in flash, because your picture will lose depth and your baked goodies will look flat.

Now you have to decide: You could bake during the day in order to benefit from the daylight as much as possible, or bake in the evening, because the pictures will then look cosier (and after all, this is associated with autumn and winter). It's best to just try it out. For a dry run you only need to have a few of the ingredients in the respective light and of course you should also photograph your children in order to get used to the light conditions.

You could try baking late in the afternoon or in the evening and tackle close-ups of the biscuits the next day, when more light is available. Your good taste will decide - it's sure not to let you down.
When taking the photos, be sure to change the image section frequently and play around with the depth of focus as much as your camera will allow!

If possible on your camera, use the white balance to prevent your pictures from having an excessive yellow or blue tint. For manual white balance, take a photograph of a white or grey area in the light in which you will also take the other pictures and use the appropriate function to tell your camera that this is a neutral area. Alternatively, many cameras offer a selection of colour corrections for different light scenarios: sunlight, flash, cloudy sky, shadow, light bulb/artificial light. Try out the individual variants to find the ideal setting. Best avoided: sunlight and one-sided, artificial light sources that produce hard shadows.

Once all the shots are in the can, you can start putting together your baking book. Here, for example, the Photo book Spiral with wipe-clean plastic covers is suitable for use in the kitchen and the hard cover Premium photo paper photo book as a classic coffee table book. The perfect accompaniment to your baking book gift: a small transparent bag with the best biscuits from your day of baking. We wish you lots of fun baking, munching and giving gifts!

You want to carry on? How about a whole cookery book or a cooking calendar!