Look - my very own cookbook!

No, I am afraid I have not had some amazing book deal offer but I have made my own cookbook.  I was asked recently if I would like to make my own Blurb book. I say recently, in fact it was a good couple of months ago and I'll be honest, it's taken me this long to sort it out as I'm such a perfectionist. I must take this opportunity to apologise to the good people at Blurb for dragging my heels!

If you've never heard of Blurb, they make books. Beautiful books. The main concept is photo books but you can add text and lots of it which make it the perfect solution of making your own cookbook! There are a couple of different ways you can go about putting your book together. You can use Bookify online, or do as I did and download the BookSmart application to your computer. There's even software for the professionals amongst us.  I found the BookSmart software incredibly easy to navigate and use. It guides you through setting up your book and is very user-friendly.

There were fully customisable page layouts and designs and if you're familiar with any kind of word processing software, you'd easily be able to find your way around the software to do all the basics like changing font types and sizes.  Adding photos was easy - a simple drag and drop motion and each category style has different layouts available. For example, there is a section for recipes and within that you can select a layout that has a big picture and small text box, just text, small picture and big text box and so on.  You can go deeper and fiddle with the layouts to move text boxes around but I didn't really feel the need to do so as I was happy with how they were.

The whole process of designing the book was easy, and could be very quick if you'e not me and very particular. When you're happy with your book and you have previewed it, you can upload it to Blurb to order it. Uploading took a minute or two and the order process was easy, allowing you to upgrade covers and papers if you so wish. There are also other things you can do, like make copies for your iPad - how handy is that? Well it would be if I had an iPad...I decided on a hardcover with premium paper in a matte finish a cost of £31.84 which seemed pretty reasonably considering it had 60 pages in it.

I anxiously awaited the arrival of my book and I have to say, it blew me away. I had always expected it to be good but I had never expected it to be as good as it was! The quality was outstanding and it looked like a proper professional book, more so than other photo books I have seen. The text and photos were crystal clear and Mr M even asked if they were my photos in the book as they made the food look so good. (I'm taking that as a compliment on my photography rather than a slight on my food!). It looks and feels like a real cookbook, I just wish you could all feel it for yourself.

I'm just chuffed to bits with it, and am contemplating ordering a second one because these are our favourite family recipes and I'd like to be able to give one to each of my children one day. I cunningly put in lots of blank pages at the end so I could write/stick further recipes in over time. Ha, future-proofing, no flies on me!  

Whilst browsing the Blurb website I discovered that you can also use your Facebook account and Instagram to make a book which is pretty cool. I'm intrigued about that so I may have to take a closer look!

I am a big fan of photo books, I make and buy several every year and I'm going to have to say that the Blurb ones are much better quality than the other ones I have made, as well as actually working out a fair bit cheaper. I'm a convert to Blurb, they have totally convinced me. I've had all kinds of ideas of books I want to make now...a wedding one and I'd like to put a book together for each of the children, talking a bit about the first few years of life. Hmm, this could turn out to be quite costly actually!

Big thank you to Blurb for sending me a voucher to make this book. I truly love it.