For a big birthday
A birthday cookbook from everyone who knows them
The problem with a milestone birthday is that the person having it has spent sixty years buying whatever they wanted. This is the gift they cannot buy.
Free to make and free to collect. You pay only if you print it.
How it works
You send one link to everyone who would come to the party. Each person adds a recipe and says why they picked it. We design every page and print it as an A4 hardback, and you see the whole thing as a PDF first.
It works well as a gift from a group, because everyone contributes something that costs them nothing but two minutes and a memory.
What makes it land
The recipes matter less than the lines underneath them. "This is what you made me the week I moved out" is the sentence that does the work.
Under every recipe there is blank space. Take the book to the party and people write in it there, next to the recipe they sent.
When to start
Four to six weeks before is comfortable. A big birthday usually has a party attached, and the same list of people is being contacted about the party anyway, so the two asks travel well together.
If the party is a surprise, be careful about who is on the list and say so in your invitation. The book itself never emails the person it is for.
Who to ask
Go wider than the party list. Old colleagues, the friend who moved abroad, the neighbour from the house before last. People who cannot come are often the ones who write the best page.
Grandchildren count. A recipe written by an eight-year-old, printed exactly as they sent it, tends to be the page that gets read first.
What contributors are asked
Every contributor gets a prompt with their recipe, so nobody faces an empty box:
- What do you always cook with them?
- Who taught you this one?
- When do you make it?
- What does it remind you of?
What arrives
An A4 hardback book on 170gsm uncoated paper, printed and bound in the UK, with one recipe per page and space under each for a handwritten note. You read the whole thing as a PDF before anything is printed.
Questions
- What is a good 60th birthday present for someone who has everything?
- Something they could not buy, and something with other people in it. A cookbook written by everyone who knows them qualifies on both counts, and it takes each contributor about two minutes.
- How many people do we need for it to be worth doing?
- Fifteen makes a proper book. Fewer works, and a slim book of twenty pages from the right twenty people still reads better than a card everyone signed at the door.
- Can more than one person organise it?
- The link can be shared by anybody, so the whole family can be handing it out at once. One person owns the book and decides when it closes.
Everyone who knows them has two minutes.
Three questions and you have a link to send. Free until you print it.