Design Your Own Christmas Cookbook

Christmas is not only a time to spend with friends and family, but also a time for enjoying delectable treats. Every year before the Christmas seasons begins people think about what kinds of recipes they can use for their Christmas feast. With our tips you can design a completely personalised cookbook with your most favourite Christmas recipes to give as a gift to your loved ones or to put in your own kitchen.

Start out by gathering together all the tasty recipes for dishes or even drinks that both you and your family love. You can create a colourful mix of traditional family recipes, elaborate creations, and gourmet tips.

Tip: Enlist help from your lovely grandmother, mother, and friends who love to cook. This will allow you to gather together everyone’s culinary treats into one cookbook while also giving your recipe collection a completely personal touch.

Arrange the recipes according to category to make the cookbook clear and easy to follow. You could, for instance, arrange the recipes into main courses, desserts, and drinks or perhaps into different taste categories such as hearty dishes or sweet treats. You could also arrange complete menus in your cookbook.

Tip: Create a table of contents to make it easier to find each recipe. You can easily activate the option of displaying page numbers while designing your cookbook in the ifolor Designer by checking the box “Show page numbers.”

You can find inspirations for elaborate variations of recipes and useful tips for preparation online, in magazines, or in cookbooks. By making your own changes and tweaks to the recipe compilation you’ll be adding your completely personalised touch to the resulting cookbook. Supplement the recipes with some of your own personal advice or tips for refining or modifying the dishes. Even tips for serving the dishes or ideas for Christmas table decorations also make great additions to the recipes. This will not only give your cookbook a personal note, but will also provide inspiration and ensure culinary success when they follow your recipes.

Food is also appetising to the eye. Therefore, start a bit early with planning your personalised Christmas cookbook. Ideally, you could cook your chosen recipes yourself before you feature them in your cookbook. This will make it possible for you to beautifully arrange and photograph the ingredients while cooking, the finished dish itself, or the punch bowl.

When arranging the food to be photographed, pay attention to your surroundings: should things like kitchen appliances or wooden spoons be visible in the background? What kind of style should the photo have? To make your cookbook more Christmassy you could, for instance, use a Christmas table cloth and suitably coloured plates to showcase the meal with some fresh herbs and cooking utensils visible in the background. You could also use your own Christmas decorations to have the perfect background for your food photos.

Besides the delectable dishes themselves, you could also photograph some of the fresh ingredients used for preparing the meal. You could arrange, for example, crisp vegetables and sprigs of herbs on a wooden cutting board. This will give your photos a better all-round look and you’ll end up with a quality and harmonious cookbook full of delectable recipes. Here you can find tips for perfect food photos (link only available in German) and tips for smartphone food photography.

Tip: Showcase the contributors in the cookbook alongside the tasty recipes. You could add a photo of grandma in the cookbook next to her traditional family recipe. Also, adding pictures of your hardworking little assistants who helped peel and dice the ingredients will really make your recipe book a family affair.

You can create your personalised Christmas cookbook with ease either online or with the ifolor Designer.

First start out by choosing a suitable format for your cookbook from our various photo books. The photo book spiral, with its robust spiral binding and flat-lying pages, would be a good choice. Then, once you’ve selected the size and orientation of your book as well as how many pages you’d like, you’re ready to get started with its design.

The ifolor Designer offers you numerous design templates with various arrangements of image and text placeholders to help you with your book’s design. This will allow you to arrange the photos of your tasty dishes and their corresponding recipes however you like. Make sure you use a clear and easy-to-follow page layout to ensure the cookbook recipient can see everything at a glance while following your recipes.

By using the various design possibilities offered in the ifolor Designer you can also make small edits to your photos or book pages to end up with a harmonious and one-of-a-kind Christmas cookbook. You could, for instance, decorate the book pages further with Christmas-themed clipart. To do this, simply click on “Design” and select “Clipart” in the dropdown menu. Here you’ll find a whole category dedicated to Christmas.