Treasured family recipes are priceless, which is why they can easily be transformed into special gifts with minimum expense and just a little time. From turning handwritten recipes into tea towels to making beautiful cookbooks for less than $5, here are our four favorite ideas for giving family recipes as gifts.
• Turn them into a cookbook: You type up the recipes and print out your own own cookbooks, or use a service like Blurb to make professionally bound books for less than $5 each.
• Turn them into tea towels: Scan handwritten recipes and use the fabric-printing service Spoonflower to print them into cotton-linen fabric, which can be sewed into beautiful tea towels.
• Frame them: Highlight a favorite handwritten recipe by framing it. (Note: it's a good idea to frame a scanned copy rather than the original recipe, as the exposure to light will cause the handwriting to eventually fade.)
• Scan them and share them: Scan recipe cards and turn them into...more recipe cards! Give them out as sets or individually to be enjoyed by other family members.
Do you have any other ideas for turning family recipes into gifts?
Related: What's the Best Way to Store My Late Mother's Recipe Collection?
(Images: See linked posts for full image credits.)
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Make the food, wrap it in a pretty package and attach the recipe! Or film two loved ones cooking a family recipe together (e.g. grandma and granddaughter) and turn it into a video.
I happen to make custom recipe prints in my etsy shop, for anyone looking for additional ideas! http://www.etsy.com/shop/MamaTitan?section_id=11786416
My mom did this 2 Christmases ago and it was a big hit! She collected recipes from the whole family and included old stand-by recipes, like my great-grandmother's Christmas cookies, to new favorites, like my husband's tomato bisque. It's great to have all the favorites in one place, and it's a great keepsake.
I made a Blurb book for my family a few years ago and it was fantastic. Highly recommended. The hardest part is typing it all up.
I am doing this for my mom this year! I am trying to find a frame that will hold four 5x7 pictures - 3 of my Grandma Jean's square recipes (strawberry, pineapple, and lemon) and then a picture of Grandma Jean baking bread that I saw in an old photo album a while ago and can't seem to find now...
My sister and I collected my grandmother's recipes from all our aunts and made them into a cookbook for her a few Christmases ago. I believe we used Blurb.com. We tried to use only family recipes and those for which she was "known". We broke it up into categories (dessert, main dishes, sauces, etc.) and probably ended up with over 30 recipes. It was a huge hit!
To be completely honest, it was a LOT of work though. However, I am very type-A so it could have just been my obsessive grammar checking. I literally spent hours reading and rereading until I was satisfied. It was worth every ounce of work though :)
I've been thinking of doing a version of a family cookbook with my mom's version of a recipe on one side, and my version on the page opposite. It could show how she inspired me at the same time as it could preserve her originals, which, let's face it, are way better anyway.
I did the family cookbook using blurb.com, and I agree that it did take a lot of time. I already had the recipes typed, so for me it was more formatting them and fixing fonts (and wierd issues like not allowing an em-dash or not recognizing what 1/4 was when it'd been formatted into the super and subscript). I made and photographed many of the recipes, but I actually used family photos on most of the pages--either the family cook who'd come up with the recipe, or family members doing things that related to the recipe (if it was a fish recipe, photos of family members fishing; my grandma in the garden for a veggie dish, etc). Both of my grandparents cried--my mother had never seen her father cry until then! It cost about $30 per book but no upfront/publishing costs.