One of the purposes of this site is referential, so that my daughter will be able to refer to posts if she entertains the desire to recreate something seen and described here. She thinks that I should put recipes in with the photos and writeups because this is a food blog.
Of course I will put SOME recipes in posts, but not in every post and certainly not in posts and photos describing some of the items I bake. Those are trade secrets. Some of my recipes took years of experimenting before they attained the qualities I desired for them. I’m still perfecting others, still thinking about new cookies, grateful that I’ve got a “mind palate” (for lack of a more suitable term.)
Having a recipe is no guarantee of success. One of the challenges on The Great British Baking Show, a program I like and which I DVR and binge watch, involves the provision of a recipe which one or more of the judges use. However, those recipes lack what may be crucial to the baker.
Specifically, they look like the first photograph taken of the family recipe book handed down to me by my mother. It contains several dozen recipes handwritten by my Dutch grandmother and great-grandmothers, mostly written in pencil which has faded dramatically over the years and with plenty of oily spots and torn pages. I typed them all in Wordperfect over 10 years ago on a computer long since gone to a recycling center, so I will be doing a project for the next generation before the original texts are totally illegible.
Meanwhile, having not given away my point until now, and to support my belief that the reason having a recipe is no guarantee of success, I offer the totality of recipes on Page 1 of the family heirloom. Have fun, you bakers.
Ms Chef in Seattle 