For most families, celebrating the holidays centers around the traditional holiday meal—and then the next meal, and the next. Susie Roberts, a happily retired, Australian mother of three grown children, created “Christmas Recipe Book” so her family would always remember the memories and the meals from Christmas 2007.
 Susie is known for her cooking. She has a collection of more than 70 cookbooks and she uses nearly all of them. She also created a cookbook filled with her children’s favorite recipes called “Mum’s Cook Book.” Her children use the book regularly, so it’s been a big hit.
Essential ingredients
According to Susie, the idea for “Christmas Recipe Book” came from her sons. “The family stayed with us for a week and every meal was greeted with the response, “Mum, you have to get us the recipe for this!” I started scanning my recipe books and decided I would enjoy the process much more if it was a creative one. I set about designing the book with the family in mind. It’s a running joke in my brother’s family that they keep all their photos in boxes in the desk drawer. By creating this book, they have a photo album of their holiday with us and at the same time, all the recipes.”
 All the trimmings
For “Christmas Recipe Book,” Susie took about 150 photographs and created the pages using digital scrapbooking techniques. According to Susie, “if you think you’ve taken enough photos, think again. You always wish you had taken that special shot of someone doing something in particular. However, once the moment is gone, it’s gone. I tried to capture spontaneous moments when the family was enjoying themselves, either opening presents or on a walk.” On reflection, she said, “I wish I had taken photos of all my finished recipe dishes, but at the time I wasn’t thinking about putting them in a recipe book. Therefore, I had to make do with photos of the ingredients.”
 Recipes for success
Susie found that the biggest obstacle was to overcome the reluctance of teenagers to have their photo taken. She believes that the best photos came from those moments when they didn’t realize that the camera was pointed in their direction. Her kids behaved more naturally than when they were posing. The second most difficult challenge, which is harder to overcome, is not having enough natural light for a good exposure. Many of Susie’s photos were taken inside and the subjects were often moving. She doesn’t like using a flash so some of her photos were a bit blurred. She overcame that problem by changing them to black and white as blurriness is not as obvious in a black-and-white shot.
Susie also found “it’s difficult being the hostess and the photographer. I always felt that I had a dish in one hand and the camera in the other. The other challenge is that, being the photographer, there aren’t many shots of me. I should have insisted that my husband take more shots so I could have been in more of them.” She admitted that next time, “she would take more photos of every person, and not be put off by any reluctance on their part.”
Christmas spice and all things nice
Susie believes that happy family celebrations are a good time to get great shots because everyone is in a good mood and enjoying themselves. Then, she’s also able to create photo books of the family together. She likes to give photo books as gifts because they’re so personal. She said “her family was really blown away by the photo book and had absolutely no idea that she was creating it, so it was a big surprise.” What an incredible holiday gift and family keepsake for the next generation.
Take a look at Susie’s Christmas Recipe Book.
Learn how to create your own photo book.
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