A Cookbook Project for 2024

I’m writing a new cookbook! - Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to another edition of Extra Food Chat with Kath!

Happy New Year!

I hope 2024 has started out well for you, with some good food and hopefully a few relaxing days as well.

For this first paid newsletter of 2024, I wanted to share with you a project I will be working on throughout the year.

I am planning to create another cookbook!

I self published my first book, Everyday Bakes, in late 2020 and it was a great experience. I learnt a lot and was so happy to see people actually bought the book and cooked out of it!

For a while I didn’t feel I had another book in me. I felt I didn’t have a big enough selection of recipes that fit a theme worthy of a book. For a time I was also still trying to sell the remaining copies of Everyday Bakes, so it felt like that project wasn’t completely over. The theme of Everyday Bakes - recipes that can fit nicely into your everyday life that were full of flavour - has remained the way I bake to this day. So I also felt maybe anything I did might not be different enough to my first book.

However, last year in October an idea for a cookbook that I suppose was brewing in the background for a while, came to me. I want to create a book filled with the cakes (and a few other bakes) that I like to fill my year with. Recipes that I love going back to, that don’t take days to make and don’t require really hard to find ingredients. The kind of recipes that produce a nice everyday snacking cake, or something that brings a little joy to your day or week. The recipes will be guided by the seasons, and I think I will divide the book up into seasonal chapters.

This is how I bake most of the time, I don’t regularly make recipes I would call ‘baking projects’ where they take a fair bit of time and possibly need rather a lot of people to eat them (things like multilayered cakes with varying fillings and decoration etc)! While I enjoy those kinds of recipes sometimes, I do prefer to make things that take a bit less time and energy to make but deliver on flavour and comfort.