Writing Down Recipes

This past Christmas, I realized I'd lost my recipe for gingerbread cake. It's something I make only once a year, but that recipe in particular (as opposed to the hundreds of others I found when I googled) was my ideal gingerbread cake. How'd I lose it? Mostly because it was an online recipe and in the pre-Pinterest days I didn't have much of a plan in place to keep my favorite recipes. Sometimes I'd email them to myself, sometimes I'd print them out, and sometimes I'd assume I could find it again when I needed it, like the gingerbread cake.

Losing my gingerbread cake recipe got me thinking about going back to a more traditional method of recipe storage: writing them down. My mom has a binder full of (mostly) hand-written recipes, and it's always neat to flip through and see which ones are in her handwriting and which ones came from friends or family. My friend Murph showed me her grandma's recipe for chocolate pie (above), which adorably describes the amount of butter needed as "size of egg" and includes the funny typo "floor" instead of "flour." There's just something special about handwritten recipes.





So the other day, I sat down to write out a few of my favorite recipes. Then I decided to fully revive the tradition and send some recipes to friends. I chose recipes of mine that each friend has loved or asked for, tied them up with yellow baker's twine and popped them in the mail as a surprise. I think the next time I want a recipe from someone, I'll hand them a recipe card (or even a piece of paper!) and ask them to write it down.

How about you, do you have hand-written recipes in your family, or from friends?