Weekly Extras: Our Cookbook!
The Baker's Atlas: A Collection of Family Favorite Desserts
Welcome back to Weekly Extras! Each week I share a variety of recipes (mine or others), inspiring pieces or brands I have come across, and what I am reading or wearing. I offer my thoughts on each and include links to relevant pieces, places, products, and more. Past columns have featured artists and creators that Dare to be Different and elements in my life that I find are Good for the Soul.
This week, I turn to something very personal—the cookbook my mom and I self-published last summer. If you follow me along Mix and Measure on Instagram, you have probably seen me talking about it. However, I realized I have not done enough and given this beautiful piece the justice and center of attention it deserves. Without further ado, I am excited to walk you through our vision, the recipe selection process, our publishing path, and design method.
OUR VISION
We wanted to build a story that leveraged the faded, hand-written heirlooms with the woven yet unwritten anecdotes. There was no rule book other than to have fun and stay true to our palette, not letting the coolness factor of a recipe be a driver.
My mother’s love for baking has always been a strong presence in my life and in my home. For as long as I can remember, our house was filled with the divine smell of freshly baked cookies, breads, bars, and cakes. I have vivid memories of my mom putting the finishing touches on her creations, her sleeves hiked up past her elbows, leaning against the counter, re-reading a recipe for the sixth time to make sure she had gotten everything right, a perfectionist at heart.
What started as an impromptu photoshoot to capture two particularly gorgeous Thanksgiving pies in 2014, transformed into an inspired collaboration. Pairing my growing passion for photography with a desire for my mom’s baking to get the recognition it deserved, Mix & Measure was whipped up. Over the ten years of collaboration and hundreds and hundreds of recipes and photos
I am thrilled and honored to celebrate the delicious years of Mix & Measure through this cookbook. These pages reflect our love of food and spontaneous creativity: testing new techniques, experimenting with food styling, and perfecting new and old recipes. From five-layer cakes to pastries and shooting in different lighting, we always pushed each other to step outside of our comfort zones.
This collection is quite the sweet tooth tour, from my mom’s infamous and most requested cranberry-nut bread, to the classic Italian favorites, and the many, many, chocolate chip cookies (both of our favorites).
It’s about the memories of the food we have eaten, baked and created. It’s about time and place, like those moments in childhood when we would rush home from school to see if Mom made our favorite cookies. Or the recipes we continuously go back to over and over again. These pages are a compilation of all the Atlas family taste buds, the repeatedly requested favorites from friends and family, and above all, it is a celebration of our passions and our shared love of being in the kitchen and the wickedly fun mother-daughter collaboration that keeps on thriving.
THE BEHIND-THE-SCENES
As you can imagine, countless hours of editing, writing, reshooting, researching and designing went into the final book. Since my mom and I were never in the same state while creating the cookbook, there was a mountain of texts and many hours-long phone calls to talk through edits, design and recipe selection (which may have been the hardest since Mom had all the veto power).
Our recipe selection was actually quite simple: choose the favorites. The ones we have made over and over for decades, requested again and again by us and our friends. Once we made the final selections, you would think, because we technically did not have to develop the recipes, that this would be a simple copy and paste scenario? I could not have been more wrong.
Many, well most, of the recipes did not include all my mom’s notes and changes she has made over the years, which is what makes all of these incredible recipes shine. Which neither of us realized until we were typing the recipes. Pages and pages of hand-written edits later it was finally perfect.
THE DESIGN
I am guided by aesthetics in everything I do. I believe beauty elevates the ordinary. Our eyes can’t help but linger over a thoughtful table setting, well-composed image, or alluring dish. With a love for aesthetics and a background in graphic design, I knew I wanted to create and design the entire cookbook from the ground up.
Immersed in the Adobe Creative Suite for the last ten plus years of my career, I was comfortable designing the entity of the book in InDesign. To ensure I was set up for printing success, I used the Blurb Indesign plug-in template which provided me with the correct frames for bleed, trim, and safety areas. From there, I started the fun process of staring at the many blank white squares, the pages, long enough to turn them into something beautiful that represented our family and our style.
I created a moodboard to represent the essence of our baking and photography style and our home, specifically the kitchen and dining nook. I strove to weave in the tonality of my mom’s kitchen with its many shades of brown and burgundy.
I landed on burgundy as the hero color for two reasons: first, simply because my mom and I love this color (it was the color of her bridesmaids). Secondly, when I visited bookshops for competitive design research, I noticed burgundy was rarely present and if it was, it certainly was not the hero. The neon orange choice of the type also arose from analyzing the competition typography palette, which typically fell into the expected categories: shades of black or white. I wanted something bold, unexpected and sophisticated, and coupled with a serif-based font, I believe I achieved this notion. To balance out the bold typography color choice, I added tone-on-tone stripes in the background to weave in the traditional style of my mom’s kitchen.
HOW WE SELF-PUBLISHED
Initially, we created the cookbook with the intent to print a limited run to only share with family and friends. However, once we shared with family and friends, we received overwhelming excitement and enthusiasm to get it published and share it beyond our close circle. At the time, self-publishing sounded incredibly daunting and beyond my reach. Where would I even begin? But it also sounded exciting, so why not look into it? After weeks of research, I landed on self-publishing through Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). It was the most accessible and affordable way to share our book beyond our close-knit community and had rave reviews about the simplicity and ease of the process. Which proved to be true.
Since Amazon’s printing requirements varied from Blurb, this required entirely reformatting the 250-page book, which took some time, my eyes are still recovering. I read countless articles and watched many YouTube videos that guided me through the step-by-step process on how to upload, where to purchase ISBN and barcode (go through Bowker and only Bowker) and the value of owning your own (versus purchasing one through Amazon or another third-party you choose to self-publish with). If you purchase through the publisher, you can only publish through them, however, if purchased through the official agency, Bowker, you can publish multiple places.
During the first approval process, I received a notice from Amazon KDP that the file formatting needed to be updated. For further clarity, I contacted the KDP customer service team to assist with the required changes. To my surprise, they were responsive and incredibly helpful - detailing the exact error. Once I fixed it, the upload process was smooth and a few days later my book was approved and ready for purchase on Amazon. An absolutely surreal and proud moment.
ON TO THE NEXT
It was an incredible experience and a joy from start to finish. I learned so much about publishing, book design and my own personal style. I am currently working on a second cookbook - featuring more cooking recipes rather than baking, as that is where I thrive. Stay tuned!
I hope you discover joy, comfort and inspiration from this cookbook as much as we did. Many of our creations were shared with our local community center, schools and neighbors — we hope that you share it forward with the community of your own.