We love cooking in The Mad House. I really enjoy teaching the boys new recipes and sharing with them recipes that have been passed down through the family. I want to make sure that I leave them with a legacy of lots of delicious family recipes. I was delighted when Newcastle Building Society set us a ‘Customise Your Life’ challenge of customising your cookbooks with your top 10 family recipes as it spurred me on.

I have been including printable recipes on the blog for a long time, so it was simple enough to print them all off to start our project. I also gathered together some materials to make the customising of our book (which I purchased from We love Bread and Jam).

Materials

Blank book
Glue stick
Stickers (we were sent ours by a lovely lady in a facebook group)
Pens
Pencils
Stamps
Tape
scissors

How to create a family cookbook with the kids

Yes I have lots of our family recipes on the blog, but there is nothing like a cookbook stained with fingermarks where the pages have been turned and marked with flavours and smells of all the meals within.

I picked a good quality blank book with thick pages, so that we could colour in and the colour not transfer through.

I started by printing out all the recipes and we cut them to size.

We then glued them in place before embellishing each page.

We wanted to make notes on who’s favorite it was and also any hints and tips that we had for making the recipe too.

Why “Customise Your Life”?

Newcastle Building Society appreciates that everyone is an individual and no two person’s needs are ever the same – especially when it comes to savings. That’s why they’ve developed its CustomISA, which allows savers to spread their tax-free savings across as many Newcastle ISAs as they like each year and is designed for savers who would usually have to decide between sacrificing rates on their ISA for access or access to their own money for a better rate.

To celebrate CustomISA’s flexibility, we are inviting a select number of bloggers to be part of a #CustomiseYourLife Blogger Challenge and our challenge was to create a customised family cookbook. I can not wait to see what the other bloggers have done.

Pocket Money

I love using crafting time to discuss things with the boys and we discussed this pocket money infographic that Newcastle Building society sent us. The boys are 8 and 10 and both get £2 pocket money a week and the opportunity to earn £2 more by doing chores. Mini said he certainly spends his money on sweets, not food! Both the boys were surprised that a quarter of 7 – 12 year old kids use a mobile phone to go online as neither of the boys have a phone and neither do most of their friends.

I would love to know how much your kids get for pocket money and how old they are.